32 2GM Tuesday July 21 2020 | the times
Wo r l d
China’s deteriorating relationship with
the United States could lead to fresh
calls for a boycott of the 2022 Winter
Olympics in Beijing.
The global spread of coronavirus
from Wuhan, the new national security
law in Hong Kong and growing evi-
dence of human rights violations in the
country’s treatment of Uighur Muslims
have all added to tensions created by a
trade war and Beijing’s aggression in
the South China Sea and elsewhere.
In April Mike Pompeo, the secretary
of state, said that he would “take a look”
at whether the US should boycott the
Games, adding: “The time for account-
ability will come”.
Rick Scott, a Republican senator
from Florida, had earlier introduced
legislation calling for the venue to beBeijing student is expelled
over tweets from America
Didi Tang
A Beijing university has expelled a
student for posting derogatory
comments about China on Twitter
when he was in America.
Ji Ziyue was dismissed by the
University of the Chinese Academy of
Sciences after he used the word “zhina”
to described China. It is a translation
considered offensive among Chinese.
In a separate post he declared the
Chinese city of Nanjing to be “Japan’s
Nanjing”, a possible reference to the
Nanjing massacre, when Japanese
troops massacred 300,000 civilians
between December 1937 and January
- The city was China’s capital at the
time. “Will it be better if China should
disintegrate,” he wrote in one tweet.
The university said: “Ji Ziyue’s acts
have harmed national interest and
honour, violated state and school rules
and hurt the feeling of the people. His
remarks were extremely mistaken.”
Twitter is banned in China but its use by
Chinese people overseas is monitored.
A rising sense of nationalism among
many Chinese abroad has made people
more ready to report any remarks that
could be deemed offensive at home.
In 2017 Shuping Yang, a student at
the University of Maryland, apologised
on social media after she gave a speech
saying “democracy and freedom are the
fresh air that is worth fighting for”.
This year Xu Kexin, a Chinese stu-
dent in the United States, used social
media to attack Beijing’s response to
the coronavirus outbreak. She called
Chinese people “contemptible”. “I will
not return to China, it feels like being in
prison,” she said. Ms Xu later apolo-
gised, saying she loved the homeland.Indian and American warships will
hold joint naval exercises in the Indian
Ocean in the coming days in a show of
unity prompted by mounting Chinese
aggression throughout the region.
An American carrier group led by the
USS Nimitz, the largest vessel in the US
navy, passed through the Malacca
Strait into the Indian Ocean on
Saturday. There it will link up with
Indian destroyers and submarines off
the coast of the Andaman and Nicobar
islands for a series of war games,
according to Indian media reports.
The two countries have held regular
joint naval exercises for more than a
decade but the latest round has
assumed greater significance amid
growing concerns over China’s political
and military ambitions in the South
China Sea and the greater Indo Pacific
region.
Chinese troops are still encamped on
Indian soil in Ladakh, high in the Him-
alayas, after clashes along the border
last month that left 20 Indian soldiers
dead, the most serious such incident
between the rival nuclear powers for 45
years. China got the better of India in a
brief, month-long war fought from
October 20 to November 21, 1962 over
the disputed Himalayan border.
Indian and Chinese military officers
are in talks to defuse the crisis but it has
prompted a trade boycott of Chinese
technology and goods by India, and
allowed Washington to step up its
efforts to draw Delhi closer into an
alliance against Beijing. It has urged
India for years to become a closer
military partner and a bulwark against
Chinese expansion.
Despite forging closer military ties
with the US, Delhi has maintained a
strategic neutrality between the two
sides until now. The pressure has in-
creased under the Trump administra-
tion, however, and the recent violence,
prompting a surge of anti-China senti-
ment throughout India, has raised
American hopes that Delhi is now
leaning towards a closer alliance with
the West.
Michael Kugelman, at the Wilson
Centre think tank in Washington, said:
“There’s certainly a realisation that the
Ladakh crisis gives India a powerful
incentive to shed its inhibitions about
antagonising China and to move closer
to the US. But there’s also a realisation
that Delhi won’t easily jettison a strate-
gic autonomy policy that has come to
replace non-alignment.
“The realistic expectation should be
that India will move closer to the US,and it will pursue even deeper security
co-operation, but it won’t be willing just
yet to become a full-fledged ally.” In a
further sign that hostilities with China
have prompted a strategic rethink in
Delhi, India is expected to invite Aus-
tralia to join its annual naval exercises
with the US and Japan. The move will
strengthen the “Quad”, an alliance of
Indo-Pacific powers that has formed to
counter China’s rising sea power.
India had blocked Australia’s
participation in the exercises for years,
viewing it as too provocative towards
Beijing, but Narendra Modi, the prime
minister, appears to have had a change
of heart. India signed a significantStaff at a Long Island hospital looking
for somewhere to store pandemic sup-
plies have stumbled upon a trove of
paintings and prints by some of the
world’s greatest abstract artists.
More than a hundred artworks, in-
cluding pieces by Willem de Kooning
and Alexander Calder, were found in a
dusty storeroom, piled up in pallets and
propped against the wall.
The coronavirus ravaged New York
in March and April and led to a flight of
many of the city’s wealthiest residents
to the Hamptons, on Long Island. Staff
at the Stony Brook SouthamptonForgotten
New tensions raise prospect
of Winter Games boycott
Henry Zeffman Washington changed unless there were “significant
improvements” in China’s human
rights record by January. His colleague
Marco Rubio called for a boycott over
the “dire human rights situation” in
Xinjiang as long ago as 2018.
Yesterday Mr Rubio shared a video
on Twitter of Andrew Marr’s interroga-
tion of the Chinese ambassador to the
UK about the Uighurs.
Beijing was selected to host the
Games in 2015, beating Almaty, in
Kazakhstan. The city hosted the sum-
mer Olympics in 2008, when there
were protests over China’s human
rights record but not a boycott.
A US boycott could be highly influ-
ential in persuading other western
countries, especially its Five Eyes allies,
to follow suit. A total of 66 countries
joined a US-led boycott of the 1980
Olympics in Moscow, including China.Divers battle
to free whale
caught in net
India teams up with US
for anti-China war games
defence agreement with Australia last
month, allowing troops from the two
countries to use each other’s military
bases.
India has responded to the fighting in
Ladakh by banning scores of Chinese
mobile phone apps, including TikTok.
The violence has provoked a nationalist
frenzy across the country, with
Bollywood stars and business figures
joining calls for a boycott of Chinese
goods. Like Britain, Delhi is also expect-
ed to bow to US pressure and bar the
Chinese tech giant Huawei from build-
ing its 5G wireless network.
Washington accuses Huawei of assist-
ing in cyberespionage for the Chinese
state, a charge the company denies.
The USS Nimitz, alongside the USS
Ronald Reagan, was part of a large
American naval deployment that
recently concluded a mission in the
South China Sea. The “freedom of navi-
gation” exercise was billed as a show of
strength and support for America’s
allies in a region where China has been
aggressively asserting its territorial
claims.
In recent weeks Chinese ships have
sunk a Vietnamese fishing boat and
harassed Malaysian oil exploration
vessels in the South China Sea. With
the controversial new security law
stripping Hong Kong of its remaining
autonomy, China has again laid claim
to Taiwan.
India, like the US, has become in-
creasingly alarmed at China’s military
expansion throughout the Indian
Ocean. Beijing has established its first
overseas military base in Djibouti, on
the Horn of Africa, with a second ex-
pected to follow at the Pakistani port of
Gwadar, close to the Strait of Hormuz,
the strategic waterway at the mouth of
the Gulf. In 2018 China acquired a port
in Sri Lanka, off India’s southern coast,
and has courted India’s neighbours
throughout the region, leaving Delhi’s
influence in its own backyard looking
increasingly fragile.India
Hugh Tomlinson Wong campaigns to be an MP
Joshua Wong, perhaps
the best known of the
young pro-democracy
campaigners in Hong
Kong, filed papers
yesterday to run for
the city’s parliament in
September, setting the
scene for another
battle with the
authorities.
Mr Wong, 23,
right, said that
Beijing had no
reasonable cause
to prevent him
standing in a
“free and fair”
election. “By
running for
office, I’d
like to turn
the legislative
council election
into aninternational case, to
show how Hong Kong
people refuse to yield,
to capitulate under the
Communist Party’s
authoritarian rule,” he
wrote on Facebook.
He has said he will
not declare allegiance
to the territory’s Basic
Law, which now
includes the national
security law
imposed last
month by Beijing,
as is required for
all candidates
in the
election. “I
know that
the odds
are
extrem
ely slim
that my name
should appear
in the ballot,”
he admitted.In an unofficial
primary this month for
the parliamentary
election, Mr Wong
garnered the most
votes in the Kowloon
East constituency. The
poll, however, has been
rejected by Beijing as
illegal and in violation
of the national security
law.
Li Xiaobing, a
scholar on Hong Kong
affairs, told the
party-run Global Times
that Mr Wong and
other opposition
candidates were
seeking to “enhance
their political presence
by staging such a
high-profile defiance”.
He added: “They
also seek to use their
disqualification as
another excuse to
create further turmoil.”Hong Kong
Didi Tang BeijingT
he Italian coastguard is
fighting to free a highly
agitated 24ft sperm whale
ensnared in an illegal
drift net off Sicily (Tom
Kington writes). Divers tried for two
days over the weekend to cut theUnited States
Will Pavia New York