China Radio International: We saw you on television, singing Suzhou opera with other CPPCC members, making a deep impression on us all. Could you tell us about some of your other leisure-time activities? In addition, the media often describes you as scholarly yet witty and well-educated but humorous. Is this part of your natural personality or has it been shaped by your diplomatic career? Thank you.
I am sure Adam Boulton will learn from this.
28 comments:
Sounds rather like Andrew Marr interviewing Gordon.
And your point is?
Sychophancy, don't you just love it.
Anyone passed this onto the BEEB and NuLab Central Office, they might get to emulate this example of Neo-Maoism.
China allows its population to discuss political issues. I know I've been there, heard it , even on the radio and television, and done it.
What China cannot abide is rudeness to its leaders and party. Therein lies the reason for your perception.
CCTV news is available on most TV platforms here. Why not tune in and find out what ordinary Chinese people watch. (OK we only get the news channel and it's in English, but the overall editorial tone is certainly not fawning)
Is anon 3:11 Andrew Marr?
One day, all interviews with politicians will be like that. Andrew Marr is in the vanguard, closely followed by a (brown) nose, by Speccy Robinson.
Intellectual rigour and incisive criticism is so last century.
China allows its population to discuss political issues.
but not to look them up on the internet, it would seem.
It sounds like 18 Doughty Street when you were interviewing a Conservative politician.
This is so childish
He said weak
Ed Balls is, and always has been, a damaging influence in politics. He personifies the stereotype that people have of him as being someone who is in it for himself and not concerned with ordinary voters. We all have to earn money, pay taxes and get depressed when looking at our pay slip each month and seeing just how much we have to hand over to the government.
Ed Balls doesn’t need to worry about this. He works, and always has worked, in the public sector. He has a plush position given to him by Gordon Brown which nets him £137,579 plus all the allowances and expenses this job brings. He literally has to buy nothing. He even gets a great big whack of money to subsidise his ‘second home’ in London, despite the fact that he lives there with his wife and sends his kids to the local school!
His aptitude as a local MP is derisory. When I was a councillor I lost count of the number of distressed constituents I listened to who had not even been contacted by their MP when they asked him for help. I have encountered many honourable and hardworking Labour MPs, yet they are being let down, as all politicians are across the country, by people like Balls who are not really interested in their constituents but rather the blinkered pursuit of power.
China is a communist state and rudeness to politicians, who are in power, is just not tolerated. This is not just a communist trait. It is also a Confucian belief. Respect for elders is vital and the cultural revolution was a failed attempt to break this down.
Soviet bloc communism had a similar intolerance of disrespect. Thus, there grew up an essentially subtle journalism where intelligent readers could ‘read between the lines.’ It is a lost art in this country. The likes of Simon Heffer and Kelvin McKenzie having grown fat on unsubtle attacks.
Many of these intelligent ex-Soviet bloc readers are now exposed to the British press. Some of them cannot give up their old habits and are shocked by the extreme naivety of the average British newspaper reader, who seems to believe virtually anything he or she is told, despite factual mistake after factual mistake. Has there ever been a more credulous and dormant population?
Wise words M Hristov. The population is indeed credulous and the great unwashed, telly-watching, arse scratching lot of them are sleep-walking into totalitarianism.
World domination has never been easier.
Its nice to se Balls heaping up Nu Labour's own funeral pyre.
m hristov
Well put.
I would add ,paradoxically , cynical. Credulous of whatever the gut instinct suggests SHOULD be believable.
Wilful perspectivism , where the truth ceases to be a matter of fact.
It applies to all sides, I'm not being partisan, and is probably a by-product of Western-style emancipation, and secularisation.
Sockpuppet - the Chinese authorities regard the internet as rude and disrespectful in content. Censorship is a natural result of banning rudeness!
And their people know who their masters are.
Balls' civil servants are getting a rap over the knuckles for allowing him to pull the "some school are charging for admission - but we can't tell you which - but there are probably lots. Its terrible - evil religious schools and trust schools the worse - I mean what would you expect ... oh and 20% of Uk parents couldn't get their children into the schools they wanted ahem ".
Mr Ed Balls fulfils that role which was so common under Mrs Thatcher. The gormless heir apparent. A person is chosen by the media and anointed successor. The ‘knives come out for him’, in his own party, and he is disposed of, leaving the PM of the day smelling of roses. Leaders like Brown (and Thatcher) need a constant supply of such people. The problem for the Conservative Party was that one of them, John Major, actually succeeded. The Conservatives have to hope that a similar fate awaits Gordon Brown’s Labour Party.
Yvette Cooper defies belief. Her Home Information Packs are an expensive waste of money. She looks like a cheeky 14 year old boy, except when ordered to heavily make herself up for Newsnight. After application of such make up she looks somewhat less convincingly female than Andy Burnham on Question Time (remember all the ‘slap’ he had on). In addition, her boots make her look like “Miss Moscow Tractor Factory 1948”. Enough of the personal insults, probably secretly enjoyed by the heartless Labour MP readers of this blog. Yvette Cooper may well outlast her husband and become the “John Major” of her party, then she will have to have “the makeover of makeovers”. She may well have the last laugh.
how fat is Ed getting? I am never one to feel pity for his dear wif but she must be feeling the strain.
Of his parliamentary ambitions I meant you dirty minded people.
"Tell us, Mr Balls, when you and your beautiful wife married, did you realise at the time that you would become the ideal, the actual template, for all achieving, chic, highly intelligent career couples with excellent taste in home furnishings?
"You are to be admired for your modesty and reluctance to put yourself forward, but for our listeners, could you tell us whether it is a strain to always maintain such an elegant, low-key facade, especially given what an important man and role model you are to the British people?"
Mr Balls, Is it correct that in your Country. Balls is a derogative terminology,WHY? We would say of Chairman Mao that he has got Balls and that was said with love and great affection.
Why did such a charming and beautiful woman with such charisma marry a man with a derogative name?
In your private passionate moments is it true that you both think of Chairman Brown with deep affection?
Why, Mr Balls, is your first name the same as the Chinese favourite programme from the west MR EDD?
Sockpuppet - the Chinese authorities regard the internet as rude and disrespectful in content. Censorship is a natural result of banning rudeness!
well I, for one, celebrate the (fast-disappearing) British right to tell anyone to **** off at any given time.
I would far rather live in a freer and ruder society than a politer and more restricted one.
Sockpuppet, I entirely agree.
I was simply relating the breakdown of rigid rules on politeness to our freedom.
Ed Balls' constituency will be Morley and Outwood at the next election. I have just had a look at this and it isn't really as safe as Labour would think. If the Tories selected a good candidate and worked the seat hard then anything can happen. It has four very marginal (demographically) Labour wards and one very safe Tory ward.
Perhaps Guido could arrange for some of the believers to descend on M&O to help the Tories get rid of this bunion on the arse of political life
So when the BBC open their Chinese language service (using our cash) they will have a deep pool of talent to choose from and corporate cultural will not be an issue.
Sockpuppet- The Chinese have a 5,000 year culture and social tradition. What you would prefer is entirely irrelevant.
Just stay in the Anglosphere and you will have nothing to worry about.
verity said...
Sockpuppet-...What you would prefer is entirely irrelevant.
Not to me, it's not.
Just stay in the Anglosphere and you will have nothing to worry about.
Quite. It is what I intend to do.
Sounds like a question Brown would get at PMQ from a backbencher!
"Does my right honourable freind agree with me that his farts smell of rose petals, and that he walks on water"
James: So this discussion about politics in China, is this before or after they send the tanks in!
I understand there is some very vigerous 'discussing of politics' in Lhasa at the moment. Perhaps the Tibetans were a little rude in 1959 then?
Adrian Yalland
Chiona's foreign policy clearly has nothing to do with what I was addressing, which was more to do with China's people's freedom to question, to challenge, but not to do so in a way that is "rude".
You could read a bit of Kant or Nietsche on the effect of abandoning the slave/master relationship. We are free, and then "truth" is up for grabs, argument wins over facts, and being disrespectful takes off.
I'm certainly not saying I would swap our system with China's. I like freedom, and enjoy being rude occasionally to idiots who write inane rubbish on threads (not you Adrian!). I'm just trying to fathom why lack of respect exists as a much greater problem in the "lkands of the free" than it does in societies which enslave their people (not literally, I mean control their people's engagement with authority.)
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