Tuesday 27 March 2018

Brief encounter Beijing-style

It's wonderful that in this day and age when everyone knows everything because it's on Facebook or Yahoo or Fox News, a short fattish bloke with an instantly recognisable haircut can climb unseen onto a long armoured train, travel a pretty long distance and end up in Beijing and then step down onto a platform and get whisked away in a black limousine and nobody knows for sure who it was, whether it was HIM or what he was doing exactly. I'm talking about Kim Jong-un of course. Some newspapers claim to know for sure that it was the North Korean leader who was on the train. Did they perhaps talk to the train driver or the Chinese stationmaster at Beijing? I doubt it. They wouldn't talk on pain of some dreadful death. It's all supposition. But surely, it must have been Kim because why else the fancy train and the mystery. It's a great tradition for North Korean leaders to travel to Beijing by train. It's part of the North Korea folk lore. Ergo, or Yinci as they say in Chinese, it was Kim training off to the Chinese capital to have a chat with the new All-Powerful- Leader-For-Ever Xi Zinping. Presumably to get his orders from the Mighty Xi for the upcoming summit with John Bolton, sorry, Donald Trump. I was not a fly on the wall or zai qiang shang fei, as they like to say in Mandarin, but I'm pretty sure the Omniscient Xi will have had one piece of advice for the Rocket Man. "Play hard ball". Or "Da yingqiu!" So Mr Trump/Bolton/Pompeo, in May you will face a man who has been on a long train journey who knows he has Xi's back. Advice to Trump and co: "Da yinqiu!" Just like it takes two to tango - haven't a clue what the Chinese for that is - it also takes two to play hard ball when it comes to nuclear summitry.

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