Two Press Conferences Where ‘No Comment’ Says a Lot

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A Tale of Two Press Conferences

There were two cringe encounters with journalists this week, one in Washington, the other in Beijing.Whatever your political orientation, you have to feel sorry for Mitch McConnell. The 81-year old leader of the US Senate’s Republicans — who four months ago suffered a concussion after a fall — froze for about 20 seconds as he remarked on bipartisanship on defense spending. He returned to the microphone after 12 minutes, said he was fine and ignored questions about who might replace him in the leadership. It was a rude question given the circumstances but an important one because of McConnell’s role in the febrile politics within the US Capitol. The Republican leader once a fiery foe of the Democrats, has emerged as relatively moderate in the age of Donald Trump. Potential successors may not be.

The questions at the press conference in China were focused on the apparent purge of Qin Gang, who’s been the country’s foreign minister since December — and his mysterious disappearance from public view. Members of the Western media tried repeatedly in English and Mandarin to get Foreign Ministry spokesperson Mao Ning to provide fresh information. Again and again, she reverted to these same words: 这个问题,新华社已经发布了消息,你可以查阅。下一个问题 — “Regarding this question, Xinhua [the official news agency] has already released the information. You can look it up. Next question.”

Even if you don’t read Chinese, you can recognize the line of ideograms cropping up again and again in her attempts to point the press away from the issue. (The Xinhua story was unenlightening.) The official record of press conference has expunged the questioning but this thread preserves the exchange based on TV footage.

Qin — a 57-year old associate of China’s president who had been fast-tracked to the senior position — was replaced by his predecessor Wang Yi, a sort of back to the future solution to an embarrassing crisis. In his latest column, “Xi Jinping Has the HR Problem From Hell,” Minxin Pei says finding competent ministers is going to be hard for China’s leader. “Xi’s options for discovering new talent are limited. One is to rely on his personal interactions and judgment. As Qin’s rapid rise and fall illustrate, however, Xi is unlikely to gain enough information about future prospects this way. Going forward, he will probably be more cautious about helicoptering unknown quantities to the top.”

But another option is risky too. Says Minxin: “The other solution is to rely on his loyalists to recommend future leadership material. But those deputies are themselves rivals, so they will inevitably advocate for their own supporters regardless of qualifications. Any sign of favoritism Xi shows to one ally could embitter another.” 

In both capitals, politics — and who fits in where and when — is a game of Jenga.

Empire and Its Discontents

Maria Tadeo of Bloomberg TV (and a one-time columnist) introduced me to this marvelous Spanish phrase: más se perdió en Cuba. It’s used to console someone who’s suffered a setback or a disappointment. “Much more was lost in Cuba!” — meaning, “suck it up” after all, Spain lost the remains of its empire (including Cuba) in the Spanish-American war. That’s not quite the sentiment among members of Spain’s right-wing Partido Popular, or People’s Party, which came short of forming a new government. Their illiberal rhetoric scared enough of the electorate to give the ruling Socialists another chance to cling to power. It wasn’t a defeat, perhaps — in the right-wing’s eyes — just an annoying postponement of the inevitable. Rachel Sanderson looks at how Spain’s autonomous regions might benefit from the electoral impasse; and Pankaj Mishra delves into what it means for the rest of the right in Europe.

The empire concept has haunted the commentary on global economy over the last couple of weeks. Whose political influence and economic clout is paramount? Who is on the upswing? Who is not? Is Europe weakened? Is Japan coming back?

Questions of imperial momentum are the subtext of China’s suddenly lame-footed long march to global domination (as Shuli Ren points out in her examination of the burgeoning lost generation in the People’s Republic). It’s also the underlying theme in Daniel Moss’s column about how the US must now take on the burden of saving the world economy because the Chinese bid for dominance is sputtering. But how useful is “empire” as a way to measure power?

Here in the UK, the old British empire is a pathetic phantom — its remnants tied to a revenant Commonwealth. Its legacy is a rapacious sweep through vulnerable cultures by plunderers with warships; at the same time, it was a dizzying display of grandeur by people who knew how to spend the loot in conspicuous if sometimes tasteless ways. Bread and circuses, an idea as old as Rome. Except nowadays, Britain is no longer as rich as it was even as it clings to its old glories, as Adrian Wooldridge astutely noted last week.

It is mostly the political right — in any country — that is afflicted by such figments. So, conservatives in Spain take heed: Your quest to remake the nation according to old mores may backfire. Basque and Catalan identities may yet pull apart what’s really left of the old empire. You don’t ever want to console someone with the words más se perdió en España.

“Global food markets have been thrown into chaos yet again — not only because of Russia’s decision to pull out of the Black Sea grain deal, but also India’s announcement that it would ban the export of many varieties of rice.” — Mihir Sharma in “India Can’t Lead the Global South and Not Feed It.”

“Contrary to some reports, Oppenheimer has absolutely not been banned in Japan — unlike some of its Asian neighbors, the country rarely takes such steps, even for politically insensitive content. But the movie’s distributor has yet to schedule a release date1; assuming one comes at all, it will be some time after the Aug. 6 and 9 memorials. Even on those anniversaries, Japan tends to avoid discussion of the rights and wrongs. That’s not to say its citizens have a uniform position — far from it.” — Gearoid Reidy in “Oppenheimer Has Reopened Debate in the US. In Japan, It’s More Complex.”

LVMH falls short and makes luxury uncomfortable. — Andrea Felsted

NatWest was wrong but Farage is still despicable. — Paul J. Davies

An old naval strategy against Iran can work for NATO and Ukraine. — James Stavridis

India’s tomatoes (and food production) are at the mercy of climate change. — David Fickling

Stop telling Tokyo not to change. That’s the beauty. — Gearoid Reidy

Some Brazilian cities have a problem with money — too much of it. — Juan Pablo Spinetto

Walk of the Town: At the British Library

On Tuesday, Prime Minister Rishi Sunak sent out a dispiriting set of tweets — if that’s what they’re still called — that prompted me to take a walk to the British Library. His demonizing messages — apparently an attempt to shore up dwindling support on the Brexit end of the Conservative party — were a depressing reminder of how the UK continues to toy with the lives of refugees, whether they be displaced politically or by economic circumstances.

So, why my trip to the library? In its collection of treasures is a 17th century handwritten manuscript, a revision to a play about Thomas More, a controversial Tudor figure who chose loyalty to the Papacy rather than fealty to Henry VIII as head of the Church of England — a convulsion of faith and politics that was the Brexit of its age. The calligraphy — curling flourishes as well as crossed-out lines — was almost certainly William Shakespeare’s and may be the only existing example of his handwriting and editing on a dramatic text. But it’s not his penmanship I was after. I wanted to cast my eye on an almost religious relic of the English defense of immigrants, or “strangers” in the words of the text.

In the scene by Shakespeare, More defends the refugees against a London mob intent on lynching them (Ian McKellen has an excellent rendition here). The future Roman Catholic saint (canonized in 1935) tells the crowd to imagine themselves as exiled by their king and seeking sanctuary:

What country, by the nature of your error,Should give you harbour? Go you to France or Flanders,To any German province, Spain or Portugal,Nay, anywhere that not adheres to England,Why, you must needs be strangers, would you be pleas’dTo find a nation of such barbarous temperThat breaking out in hideous violenceWould not afford you an abode on earth.Whet their detested knives against your throats,Spurn you like dogs, and like as if that GodOwed not nor made not you, not that the elementsWere not all appropriate to your comforts,But charter’d unto them? What would you thinkTo be us’d thus? This is the strangers’ caseAnd this your mountainish inhumanity.

I wanted the actual object to reassure me that all of our ongoing “mountainish inhumanity” will eventually be just sound and fury, signifying nothing. But the manuscript was nowhere in sight. It hadn’t been since a big exhibition in 2016, apparently. The very kind custodian said that sometimes, after an item has been on display for a while, “it has to rest.” I understood, but the issue of refuge — and the strength to grant it — is not yet at rest.

There would be no objective correlative to relieve me of my anxieties. However, as I was leaving the grounds of the library, I looked up and saw this banner:

I took heart. It isn’t Shakespeare but the words are eloquent enough.

One More Goodbye: Sinead O’Connor 

I try to end these newsletters with a drawing, but I thought I’d use the opportunity to circulate these lines by the late US poet laureate Howard Nemerov. It’s called “At the tomb of the unknown celebrity” and, with apologies for changing the original gender pronouns. I’d like to dedicate it to the Irish singer whose death was announced on Wednesday.

You see how strange it is about the soul,Hardly a one among the lot of usWho witnessed her eccentric visit thoughtOf her as anything other than she seemed,Borne to us across an emptiness of spaceAnd evanescing into it againAfter the light went out, the lights went up,Leaving us swept with empty empathy.

But now it turns out that she had a soul,Or was one, dead in the middle of the wayExactly, gone from now here to no where,The undercover agent loved by us allAs by us all unknown, a stranger inThe unsuspected skin, her actor’s artPerfected to vanishing in the alien part.

Notes: Please send inspiring poetry and heartfelt feedback to Howard Chua-Eoan at hchuaeoan@bloomberg.net.

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This column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners.

Howard Chua-Eoan is a columnist for Bloomberg Opinion covering culture and business. He previously served as Bloomberg Opinion’s international editor and is a former news director at Time magazine. 

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