Editorials
Monday, September 27, 1999China’s aid offers
in Taiwan quakeIT is a measure of the mutual distrust between Beijing and Taipei that China's offer of aid in the earthquake disaster on Taiwan has been regarded with suspicion.The issue: China offered aid to Taiwan after last week's earthquake.
The Taiwan government accused China of exploiting its misfortune by trying to assert sovereignty over the island. It said Beijing had slowed international aid efforts by its meddling.
Taipei thanked Beijing for its offers of aid but has fumed over reports that Beijing expected foreign governments to seek its approval before dispatching emergency relief to Taiwan. Foreign Minister Jason Hu said in many cases this had delayed foreign rescue missions. He accused China of violating international humanitarian principles. Taiwan's Red Cross urged foreign donors to contact Taipei directly.
Since the 1980s China has received more than $50 million in disaster relief from Taiwan donors but China had never sent aid to Taiwan before last week's earthquake. That record explains the skeptical response to the current offer. Taiwan officials declined Beijing's offer to send rescue teams, tents and quilts, but left the door open to an offer of a cash donation.
Rescue teams from 17 countries, including the United States and Japan, have been working in Taiwan. A spokesman for Taiwan's Mainland Affairs Council said that if the Chinese came to Taiwan, "it's not clear to me whether it would be useful or not. We welcome humanitarian assistance, but I'm afraid they could have some political purpose."
Taiwan President Lee Teng-hui infuriated China by declaring that Beijing-Taipei relations should be on a "state to state" basis. The Communist regime responded by renewing its threat to invade Taiwan if it sought independence and even staging a mock invasion. Beijing may have decided that the earthquake gave it an opportunity to soften its bellicose image.
Whether China's expressions of sympathy for the quake victims were sincere is a matter of conjecture in view of its callous treatment of its own people. But the posture may have backfired if Taiwan's people view the Chinese offers as making political gestures over their suffering.
Detecting art fraud
NINETEENTH-century French artist Camille Corot is said to have completed 800 paintings, 2,000 of which are in the United States. Such has been the proliferation of fake paintings of the masters, and the works of Vincent van Gogh have been among the most fiendishly copied.
It's about time that modern technology was used to settle questions of authenticity, and Amsterdam's Van Gogh Museum is vowing to do so, beginning with a declaration of authenticity for a van Gogh in its newest exhibition.
Van Gogh's works are vulnerable to fakery because he became especially prolific and departed from his previous style in his final years. The fact that many of the 1,100 paintings attributed to him have been in dispute has not diminished the value of those that are indisputably by him. The highest price ever paid for a painting was $82.5 million for van Gogh's "Portrait of Dr. Gachet."
To counter any doubts before they could be raised, the Amsterdam museum announced the results of an elaborate investigation of a long-suspect version of van Gogh's "The Garden of St. Paul's Hospital" before admitting the painting to its exhibition.
X-rays, ultraviolet light, high-power microscopes and chemical analysis of tiny scrapes of paint from the canvas were examined to assure that the paints were of the same types and hues as the artist's favorites. Pliers marks were compared with those used in stretching and mounting canvases of other van Gogh paintings.
Results of the probe seemed to remove any doubts about the painting's authenticity. The doubts were founded on van Gogh's similar version of the same subject.
However, after all that, French art historian Benoit Landais still believes the hospital painting might have been created by Dr. Gachet, known to have been an amateur painter. "The Gachets were fakers, and people don't know the half of it," he snarled.
Alas, art fakery lives on.
Air tour crash
UNTIL investigators determine the cause of the crash of a sight-seeing flight on the slopes of Mauna Loa, the question of whether additional regulation of such flights is indicated will remain.
The airplane and helicopter tour industry has been under tighter flight rules since 1994, after a series of fatal helicopter crashes here. Over the past 25 years, about 70 passengers have died in sightseeing accidents in the islands.
This disaster, in which 10 people died, involved a fixed-wing aircraft, a twin-engine Piper 31-350 Chieftain. The plane was reported overdue Saturday night but the wreckage was not found until Sunday morning, at the 10,500-foot level of Mauna Loa.
Sightseeing air tours have grown rapidly here, and now transport about 400,000 people a year. This crash isn't going to close down the industry, but additional safety measures may be needed to bolster confidence if it turns out that such steps are warranted.
Published by Liberty Newspapers Limited PartnershipRupert E. Phillips, CEO
John M. Flanagan, Editor & Publisher
David Shapiro, Managing Editor
Diane Yukihiro Chang, Senior Editor & Editorial Page Editor
Frank Bridgewater & Michael Rovner, Assistant Managing Editors
A.A. Smyser, Contributing Editor
