It was a “diplomatic incident”, but of a different kind. Chinese ambassador to India Zhang Yan got into a verbal spat with a journalist at a five-star hotel here Thursday, even telling him to “shut up”. This was soon after the journalist from a business magazine sought the ambassador’s reaction to a map of India showing incorrect boundaries printed in a brochure published by a private Chinese power company TBEA.
Mr Zhang was at the hotel for an event organised by CII where the chief guest was Nur Bekri, governor of China’s Muslim-majority Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region, now on a four-day visit to India.
When the reporter first asked him about the map, the envoy responded: “Don’t do the story”. When he persisted, Mr Zhang said “shut up”, at which the reporter protested loudly that he wouldn’t be spoken to in this manner.
The map in question shows parts of Arunachal Pradesh and Jammu and Kashmir as not being in India. China claims sovereignty over parts of Arun-achal, Ladakh and some other areas of Jammu and Kashmir. Incidentally, even before the journalist questioned the envoy about the map, a senior external affairs ministry official had drawn his attention to it, saying the map was wrong. The envoy accepted this, claiming it was a private company’s work.
Later, in a bid to pacify the bristling journalist, the envoy came up to him and said: “This is a technical issue. We handle these issues. Your joint secretary has mentioned it and I said we’ll look into this. I have talked to our people.”