Talk about government sponsorship of offensive art. It turns out that a special photo exhibit honoring the fiftieth anniversary of Communist dictatorship in China (death toll, conservatively estimated: tens of millions) went up last week in the U.S. House of Representatives' Cannon Office Building. It also turns out that the ceremonial unveiling of these Deng-spattered pictures was presided over on Oct. 12 by nine members of China's kangaroo National People's Congress, who were in Washington last week -- the first such delegation of Chinese "legislators" since the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre -- at the invitation of the House leadership.
And how did THE SCRAPBOOK learn about this visit? Not from any formal announcement by the House, which at least had the residual good sense to be squeamish about gladhanding such a group. It seems that the delegation's unofficial hosts -- a group of Beijing apologists in Congress led by Republican representative Donald Manzullo, who fashion themselves the "U.S.-China Inter-Parliamentary Exchange Group" -- originally intended to keep the whole thing totally quiet. Manzullo and Co. understandably wanted zero media coverage of their involvement with such unsavory characters, and made that desire known to the Chinese embassy in Washington.
But a spokesman at that embassy, perhaps well practiced at shipping American secrets overseas, promptly leaked word of the whole affair -- including the press-embargo request -- to the Hong Kong Standard, which in its Oct. 14 edition published an account of the National People's Congress members' ongoing meetings with their American opposite numbers.
The cat thus out of the bag, the head of the Chinese NPC delegation then felt free to tell the AP why he was really in the nation's capital: not for some dopey photo exhibit, but to urge defeat of the Taiwan Security Enhancement Act now pending in Congress.
A week before all this happened, Hong Kong's Beijing-installed puppet leader Tung Chee-hwa had endorsed the travel ban China imposes on that territory's prodemocracy legislators -- on grounds that they do not "perform well in various aspects" and are consequently "not well accepted by the mainland."
Tung no doubt prefers the behavior of the U.S. House of Representatives, which is apparently prepared to welcome in its halls anti-democratic lobbying by officials of the world's largest and most powerful tyranny.