Zhang Biao, Beijing’s man in Scotland, warned earlier this month that a proposed friendship agreement between Edinburgh City Council and Taiwan’s southern city of Kaohsiung would ‘hurt the feeling[s] of the Chinese people’. The people of China, from Shenzhen to Harbin – all 1.4 billion of them – can sleep easy tonight: the proposal has been pulled from the council’s agenda. Whether it will reappear is unclear. The city’s leader, Cammy Day, has announced that ‘more discussion is required before taking this agreement forward’. Discussions which could presumably, if necessary, go on indefinitely.
Edinburgh Airport feared the agreement could harm work to increase the number of direct flights to China
Anyone with the faintest understanding of Beijing’s paranoia over Taiwan – and the way in which China is willing to weaponise anything to enforce their ‘One China’ principle worldwide – will know that the suspension of the Edinburgh-Kaohsiung partnership has little to do with safeguarding the sensibilities of the Chinese people.
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