China has driven Nepal’s official media to self-censor Tibet, Taiwan coverage

China has formally complained to Nepal that its recent ban on the Chinese-owned, Singapore-based TikTok app was for ‘geopolitical reasons’ and it would not look at it kindly, said an opinion piece posted on kathmandupost.com Dec 25. The piece also notes that China had become more hawkish in its diplomacy with Nepal in recent times amid perception that Prime Minister Pushpa Kamal Dahal wants to keep a safe distance from it in his newfound realisation that to prolong his stay in power, it is New Delhi he must humour, not Beijing.

While the prime minister struggled to explain that the TikTok ban had nothing to do with geopolitics, it is worth noting that official Chinese protests these days are not limited to decisions of the Nepal government and its agencies, the piece has noted.

If a Nepali news outlet publishes something that even remotely smacks of support for Taiwan or Tibet, the Chinese quickly take it up with Kathmandu, columnist Biswas Baral has noted.

So Rastriya Samachar Samiti and The Rising Nepal have stopped printing anything the Chinese may find problematic. The northern neighbour now wants the (often easily cowed) Nepali state to impose similar censorship on private media, Baral has said.

What is more, Nepal is finding it difficult to deal with an increasingly assertive China which employs what amounts of wolf diplomacy more than Confucian charm on it.

He has cited the instance when the Chinese Ambassador Chen Song openly declared that Nepal was unfortunate to have neighbours like India. “When the foreign ministry summons Chen for an explanation, he shrugs: He was just stating a plain truth. Talk to senior government officials and diplomats, and they seem to be at a loss for how to deal with such Chinese insouciance,” Baral has noted.

Also, citing an interaction he had with a leader of the more pro-China CPN-UML after his recent visit to China, Baral has said that the Nepali communist party leader was miffed that the Chinese gave him short shrift whenever he tried to raise matters of Nepal’s interest, even as they enthusiastically spoke of Kathmandu’s need to support this or that initiative of their own.

Baral suggests that for any kind of engagement with China, it is worth noting what former Indian foreign secretary Vijay Gokhale, a fluent Mandarin speaker himself, had written: “A key to getting the Chinese negotiators to take serious notice of your concerns is to keep them from choreographing the negotiation. Challenge all points of their interest and raise all issues of your own even if they are not on the agenda. If this frustrates or irritates them, that helps limit their control of the negotiation.”

This is because, in any negotiation, “they “the Chinese) like to set the agenda, put the other side on the defensive from the outset. As the low-ranking Chinese interlocutors don’t have the power to take vital decisions, they rarely budge from the line handed from above.”