Ireland South MEP Mick Wallace capped a nine-day trip to China with political ally Clare Daly by revealing a new tattoo on state television.
It came during the latest of a series of interviews in which the two affirmed Chinese government talking points during a crucial week for diplomacy between Brussels and Beijing.
“It’s actually my first tattoo, and I got it in Xi’an,” Mr Wallace told China’s official state news agency during an interview that was approvingly shared on social media by China’s ambassador to the EU and its foreign ministry’s European affairs chief.
The former Wexford TD showed the camera the black lettering across his wrist, which said “no war” in Chinese.
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On Chinese microblogging site Weibo, some commenters questioned Mr Wallace’s choice of typeface for the tattoo and whether he picked it himself, with one comparing it to Times New Roman or the kind of font that would be used in an official document.
But senior Chinese diplomats Fu Cong and Wang Lutong praised the MEP on Twitter, adding that China is a “peace-loving country” and “never starts war” - core messages of the Chinese state in a week in which it conducted military drills off Taiwan, practicing a blockade of the island and precision strikes.
‘Under threat’
It came after Taiwan’s democratically-elected president Tsai Ing-wen visited the US and urged lawmakers to continue to support the island given its democracy was “under threat”.
Taiwan, which has a minority population of diverse indigenous tribes, began to be settled by people from the Chinese mainland centuries ago and was declared a province of the Qing dynasty in 1885. It was subsequently seized by Japan, before becoming the base to which the national Republic of China government retreated when it was driven out by the Communist forces of Mao Zedong after he took power in Beijing in 1949.
The Chinese Communist Party considers Taiwan to be a breakaway province of China, while the government of Taiwan maintains that the “authorities in Beijing have never exercised sovereignty over Taiwan”.
The issue of how supportive the EU and its member states should be of the self-governing island was centre stage throughout Mr Wallace and Ms Daly’s visit, which coincided with trips to China by a succession of top European political figures including French president Emmanuel Macron and German foreign minister Annalena Baerbock.
A controversy blew up when Mr Macron told journalists on the plane home that the EU should not be a “vassal” and should avoid getting caught up in any conflict between the US and China. The comments were criticised as sending the message to Beijing that there would be no consequences from Europe if it chose to invade Taiwan.
‘Part of China’
For his part, Mr Wallace said during a television interview shared by Chinese official government accounts that “Taiwan is part of China. It is just off the mainland of China”.
“We would like Europe and the Americans to stay out of China’s business, antagonising about Taiwan, with visits here and there,” he said.
Ms Daly said during an interview with the Chinese state broadcaster that Europe had “shot itself in both of its feet” by placing sanctions on Russia in response to its invasion of Ukraine and that “the European economy would completely collapse” if it were to do the same to China.
Both MEPs took the opportunity while on their trip to disparage Western journalists.
“US money funds a lot of the media in Europe. They say that’s because we want to fund independent media. But then it’s not independent, you know?” she told a reporter from state-run CTGN. “The people who give the message to the public are getting money in many instances from the National Endowment for Democracy (NED).”
Provoked ire
The NED is an organisation funded by the US budget to promote democracy overseas that has been banned in Russia and has provoked the ire of China’s foreign ministry, which accuses it of fomenting “anti-China” programmes in Hong Kong, Xinjiang and Tibet.
Mr Wallace has previously questioned if Irish Times journalists are “taking the money from the National Endowment for Democracy”. A spokeswoman for the NED said in an email that the organisation “does not work in Ireland”.
In a series of Tweets during the trip, Mr Wallace said the BBC should be labelled as “state funded media” and posted a photo of an everyday scene in a park in the city of Chengdu, or “what some Western Media would describe as the ‘Oppressed Masses’”, a quip that was widely shared on Weibo.
