Last week, the Chinese government refused to extend the press credentials of a very intrepid American journalist who has covered China for Al Jazeera English for the past 5 years. With her visa about to expire, she left Beijing on Monday.
As you can imagine, the local foreign press corps are quite upset and in various briefings and press conferences in town laslt week, they tried to get answers from the government spokespeople as to why she had been given the boot.
No information was forthcoming.
On Thursday, a commentator writing in the English language Global Times, tried to defend the government's actions, even though it was obvious that he also didn't have a clue why it had happened.
In the process he wrote what may very well go down in the annals of time as the world's greatest political utterance:
"China didn't give a specific reason for expelling this reporter. This ambiguity cannot be criticized."
"THIS AMBIGUITY CANNOT BE CRITICIZED!"
I love it!
As a follow-up, the reporter wrote a farewell letter: Goodbye to China, Country of Contradictions. It is worth a read.
(Note….if you were here earlier and found the link to be broken, try again. It should work now. Thanks to SH for alerting me.)
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The link is showing up broken for the reporter’s farewell article.
Thanks, Sharee. I fixed it.