‘When small men begin to cast big shadows’, wrote the Chinese intellectual Lin Yutang, ‘it means the sun is about to set.’ It is a dictum that, like many, functions neatly in reverse. When small countries stand up to the great, it might well be a sign of a new day.
The small nation of Czechia brought us Swarovski crystal, Sigmund Freud, Skoda cars, Pilsener and Kafka’s Josef K. Now add Pavel Novotny, poker player, satirist and the mayor of Reporyje, one of 22 Prague districts and home to around 5,000 people, who wrote an obscenity-rich letter to the Chinese foreign minister some weeks ago demanding an apology for his attack on Czech Senate president Milos Vystrcil.
Monty Python’s Michael Palin says that the Czechs are among the world’s funniest people. Novotny’s abrupt démarche is worthy of a far longer disquisition on a Czech cultural DNA of defiant social humour, usually brewed alongside earnest beer consumption. However, this amusing verbal mooning flags some serious considerations for Australia as it gauges the dregs of its own China relationship. Are we reading it right?
Novotny’s screed is a rude aside in a post–Velvet Revolution history of values-based Czech foreign policy. It came hard on the heels of an 89-strong delegation led by Vystrcil to Taiwan. China’s foreign minister, Wang Yi, rebuked Vystrcil with the threat that he would ‘pay a heavy price’. A few days later Vystrcil, channelling John F. Kennedy’s famous 1961 Berlin declaration against the Soviet menace, responded in Taiwan’s parliament, ‘I am Taiwanese.’
Read the article by Gordon Weiss in The Strategist.
[Editor: The pluckiness of the Czechs and their use of wry humour comes across in this novel perspective of the character of a people.]