ReportageBeijing is interfering in Nepalese politics and society to promote its model to the communist government taking advantage of the tensions between Kathmandu and India, its historical partner.
Scarlet dress matching her lipstick, black boots and scarf, mischievous smile, Hou Yanqi poses in the embrasure of a carved door of Bhaktapur, capital of an ancient kingdom, located in about fifteen kilometers from Kathmandu. Her photos, posted on Twitter on December 31, 2019, to encourage the Visit Nepal 2020 campaign to promote tourism in the country, could just as easily be those of a Chinese tourist on a spree. Gold, Mme Hou, 51 years old but who seems ten younger, is none other than the Chinese ambassador to Nepal.
In this former kingdom of 30 million inhabitants which unfolds vertically across the world between India and the Chinese “autonomous” region of Tibet, His Excellency is on all fronts: distribution of scholarships, vaccines, inauguration of construction sites. , seminars on the Chinese model, but also tour of Nepalese politicians – to the chagrin of an India stunned by these forays into its backyard.
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“The Nepalese have a positive a priori towards China, because anti-Indian sentiment is very widespread. During the Cold War, and until the abolition of the monarchy in 2008, China kept a low profile in Nepal ”, explains the Nepalese researcher Shiva Tiwari, director of Nepali Journal of Contemporary Studies. But, following the peace process that ended the civil war between the Maoist insurgents and the government forces (13,000 dead, from 1996 to 2006), the obedient parties Communist won a relative majority, then, in 2017, two-thirds of the seats in Parliament, before forming the Communist Party of Nepal (NCP). The fusion of the two main components of the communist movement which constituted it, the Marxist-Leninists of the Prime Minister, Khadga Prasad “KP” Sharma Oli, and the Maoists of Pushpa Kamal Dahal, known as “Prachanda” (“the fierce”), was then described as “negotiated” by China, which welcomed it.
Nepalese Communists, Nationalists and. populists do not miss an opportunity to proclaim their hostility to US imperialism and Indian expansionism: “In practice, China exploits the good dispositions they have towards it through their ideological kinship. Even though the Nepalese communists have become moderate and respect the multiparty system ”, continues Mr. Tiwari. So much so that in April 2020, when signs of dissension appeared between Oli and the Maoists, the chic and shocking ambassador toured each other. “She let him know so much that it was quite strange and awkward”, notes a European diplomat.
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