Angry in the Great White North

In the aftermath of the official visit of the Dalai Lama to Canada, which included a public greeting from Stephen Harper on Parliament Hill, the Chinese government sent its own delegations of "Tibetans".

The job of this delegation, presumably, was to tell everyone how much the Tibetans enjoy being oppressed, and how inferior Tibetan culture is to Chinese pseudo-communism:

The leader of a delegation of "Tibetologists" backed by the Chinese government, yesterday compared Prime Minister Stephen Harper's meeting last week with the Dalai Lama to China officially supporting Quebec separation.

"Imagine if our government supported the separation of Quebec from Canada, how do you think you would feel?" said An Caidan, a researcher at the China Tibetology Research Center.

Mr. An, who is Han Chinese, was speaking at a news conference at the Chinese embassy of four Tibet specialists who are on a cross-country tour of Canada clearly designed to counter the red-carpet welcome the Tibetan spiritual leader received last week in Ottawa.

Now here's the weird thing. According to this report, the delegation was caught flatfooted by questions about Quebec:

When asked whether Tibetans should have the same chance to determine whether they wish to stay part of China as Quebeckers had in the referendums of 1980 and 1995, there was clear anxiety among the visiting experts. They passed notes to each other and attempted to avoid responding.

Mr. An, who first raised the comparison with Quebec, said the two situations could not be compared because Canada was only 100 years old while the history of the Chinese nation was 5,000 years old.

Asked again whether they thought it was a good idea for Tibetans to vote in a referendum on separation, Mr. Ciren responded that "we are not in a position to be representing the will of the Tibetan people, but I think the people in Tibet will not have a referendum."

Note passing? How could these guys not have had answers prepared with regards to analogies between Quebec and Tibet?

Did these people really believe they could come to Canada and just burble on about "friendship" and that would be it? For crying out loud, they brought up Quebec as if that parallel would make Canadians nod their heads and suddenly apologize profusely for having offended the Chinese.

What? These Canadians aren't just rolling over when I mentioned Quebec. What's going on here? We were told they were spineless jellyfish, and here they are acting like those Americans, refusing to simply accept our position. Quick, insult them by mentioning how much older and therefore how much superior China is. Yeah, that'll work.

Idiots. But if that's what was going through ther heads, they at least got one thing right. Under the Liberals, none of this would have happened. The Liberals would only be interested in keeping Canadian business interests (mostly in Quebec) happy, and so they would have happily been the spineless jellyfish.

Those days are gone, and with any luck, aren't even coming back.

Note: Officially the Chinese government did not send these guys:

The Tibetologists are being sponsored on their trip by the China International Culture Association, which they said was a civil organization, unrelated to the Chinese government.

And yet in at least two places on the web (including this Wikipedia entry for the Beijing Film Academy), the China International Culture Association refers back to the website ChinaCulture.org, a government operation:

Chinaculture.org offers broad access to up-to-date cultural news about China with a wealth of information about Chinese history, culture, politics and the economy.

Under the guidance of the Ministry of Culture, Chinaculture.org was developed and is maintained by Chinadaily.com.cn. Chinagate.org, originally Culturalink.gov.cn, began a trial run in January 2002. On October 1, 2003, the Website began offering comprehensive information services in both Chinese and English, and changed its domain name to Chinaculture.org.

No big surprise, but there you go.