China goes to great length to protect and cultivate its image. The lobbying to change the name of the Wuhan Flu to COVID is a perfect example. There was a long and established prescident of naming diseases after their place of origin but China was able to get the World Health Organization to bend over and buck the trend. (German Measles, Spanish Flu, West Nile Virus, Ebola (a river in Zaire), Ebola Marburg and Ebola Reston (betcha never heard of these - Germany and Virginia) Lyme Disease, Rocky Mountain Spotted Fever, Norovirus - I could go on at some length) Along comes a new virus from a lab in Wuhan, China and all of a sudden, the spin doctors run up to full speed and COVID enters our lexicon.
Here is another example - from the England's The Guardian:
China insists Genghis Khan exhibit not use words 'Genghis Khan'
A French museum has postponed an exhibit about the Mongol emperor Genghis Khan citing interference by the Chinese government, which it accuses of trying to rewrite history.
The Château des ducs de Bretagne history museum in the western city of Nantes said it was putting the show about the fearsome 13th century leader on hold for over three years.
The museum’s director, Bertrand Guillet, said: “We made the decision to stop this production in the name of the human, scientific and ethical values that we defend.”
It said the Chinese authorities demanded that certain words, including “Genghis Khan,” “Empire” and “Mongol” be taken out of the show. Subsequently they asked for power over exhibition brochures, legends and maps.
If I were that director, I would show some stones and tell them to piss up a rope. A history museum should not be goaded into rewriting history. A bit more - backstory:
The spat comes as the Chinese government has hardened its discrimination against ethnic Mongols, many of whom live in the northern province of Inner Mongolia.
The exhibit was planned in collaboration with the Inner Mongolia Museum in Hohhot, China. But tensions arose, the Nantes museum said, when the Chinese Bureau of Cultural Heritage pressured the museum for changes to the original plan, “including notably elements of biased rewriting of Mongol culture in favour of a new national narrative”.
And of course:
The Chinese consulate in Paris did not immediately return calls for comment.
Screw them - they were celebrating the history of a great people. They should not be erased because of some un-elected faceless bureaucrat in an office in Beijing.
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