Global News Journal
Beyond the World news headlines
from Africa News blog:
Was South Africa right to deny Dalai Lama a visa?
By Isaac Esipisu
Given that China is South Africa’s biggest trading partner and given the close relationship between Beijing and the ruling African National Congress, it didn’t come as a huge surprise that South Africa was in no hurry to issue a visa to the Dalai Lama.
Tibet’s spiritual leader will end up missing the 80th birthday party of Archbishop Desmond Tutu, a fellow Nobel peace prize winner. He said his application for a visa had not come through on time despite having been made to Pretoria several weeks earlier. (Although South Africa’s government said a visa hadn’t actually been denied, the Dalai Lama’s office said it appeared to find the prospect inconvenient). Desmond Tutu said the government’s action was a national disgrace and warned the President and ruling party that one day he will start praying for the defeat of the ANC government.
It’s the second time the Dalai Lama has been unable to honour an invitation to South Africa by Tutu after failing to make it to a meeting in 2010.
South Africa will certainly win more plaudits in Beijing, which last week agreed to $2.5 billion in investment projects with during a visit by South African Deputy President Kgalema Motlanthe.
But pro-Tibet activists say South Africa is undermining its credentials as a country of freedom and democracy, established after the end of white minority rule a generation ago.
Panda-mania rocks Taiwan
By Ralph Jennings
Tuan Tuan and Yuan Yuan arrived in a city gripped by panda-mania today. You would think David Beckham or Tom Cruise had just flown into Taipei.
Local TV stations announced the arrival of the two giant pandas from China with the rolling headline: “We’re coming!” TV anchors working the story have given viewers across Taiwan every detail imaginable about the four-year-old pandas — from the fruit and corn buns they love to eat to hopes they will mate at the Taipei zoo and produce a cub.
Michael Turton, a widely read English-language blogger in Taiwan, said China had scored a public relations coup by donating the pandas to its political rival across the Taiwan Strait. “Pandas are so non-threatening … They’re so cute and they’re so widely accepted all over the world as a symbol of China. It’s very successful.”
Not long ago, the pandas would probably have flown to Taiwan via Hong Kong. But since Taiwan’s pro-China President Ma Ying-jeou took office in May, once icy ties have warmed and the pandas flew direct from China, courtesy of direct daily air links that took effect last week.
Merchandise of the two pandas — whose names said together mean “unite” — has been a big hit in Taiwan. At the Taipei airport, softball-sized ceramic images of the pandas sell for $100 in the departure terminal. At shops in the city, stuffed pandas or panda mobile phone ornaments are on sale. Taipei’s zoo, where Tuan Tuan and Yuan Yuan will be shown to the public after a month in quarantine, is also stocking up on toys with as many as 30,000 people expected to walk through the pandas’ garden-like hillside enclosure each day.
Communist officials in China hope the pandas will help people in Taiwan, a self-ruled island that China wants to take back into its fold, see Beijing in a more positive light.
How ’bout that “panda mania,” eh?
Here are actual *first day* figures for visitors to new animals at the Taipei Muzha Zoo:
* Penguins: 96,328 visitors
* Koalas: 87,613 visitors
* Pandas: 18,057 visitors
Here’s a screenshot showing where I got those numbers:
http://tinyurl.com/b2falt
I’ve been reading that there’s a limit of 22,000 visitors per day for the pandas (a much lower number than the “30,000″ mentioned in the above article), but the actual number of visitors is about 18% shy of even that lower figure.
“Panda mania” — ha!
Tim Maddog,
A Taiwan Matters blogger
Remembering Beijing’s cramped housing
By Niu Shuping
China’s economic reforms have made a huge difference in the availability of affordable and spacious housing.
After I graduated in 1988 from a university in Wuhan, I found a job in Beijing and lived in a dormitory on the top floor of a five-storey office building.
Sixty graduates from all over China who had come to Beijing to work lived in dormitories in the building. Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Qin Gang even stayed there at the time.
We had only one kitchen for all 60 people. Sometimes people queued to cook dinner. We struggled to find restaurants open after 6 p.m., even in downtown Beijing.
There was one telephone in the middle of a long corridor on the fifth floor, outside a room with a television, which was the only place for us to relax. We had no privacy.
So what if the world community had ignored apartheid for all those years? Now what country has the guts to stand up for some principles or is that no longer important to them?