Update | Mainland Chinese media names and shames foreign airlines that refuse to comply with ‘Orwellian’ Taiwan demands
State-run newspaper posts ‘black hoarding’ of carriers that have yet to list the self-ruled island as part of China on their websites
China’s mainland media has joined in the fanfare to pressure overseas airlines to identify Taiwan, Hong Kong and Macau as being part of the same country.
Washington has described Beijing’s push to force foreign airlines to comply with its standards by Friday as “Orwellian nonsense”, but the government is adamant that the foreign airliners must respect China’s “territorial integrity and sovereignty, its laws and the feelings of the Chinese people”.
Aviation analysts said that even though the demand is a political one, airlines were likely to comply because of the size of the Chinese market.
Global Times, a nationalist tabloid owned by the party mouthpiece People’s Daily, named and shamed the major overseas airlines still holding out in a social media posting on Wednesday.
“The deadline is approaching and these overseas airlines are still resisting,” one article posted on its WeChat feed said.
The article has been viewed by more than 50,000 WeChat users and widely circulated by other news outlets, including the website of the overseas edition of People’s Daily.