China has been harshly critical of nearby Malaysia over its handling of the downed Malaysian Airlines flight 370. Chinese citizens even went as far as to stage a heated protest outside of the Malaysian embassy in Beijing. A number of Chinese citizens died in the crash, so feelings of remorse and even anger may be justified, but channeling them towards an entire nation of Malaysians who had nothing to do with the crash is not. Recently, Malaysians have taken to various social media platforms to voice their frustration with China for such antagonistic behavior.
Many feel that China is being sharply hypocritical, as it called for greater transparency from the Malaysian government throughout the investigation. These individuals pointed out that China currently has one of the least transparent government regimes and therefore should not be admonishing others for similar levels of guardedness. The Malaysian government seems to have mixed feelings about its populations backlash towards China. On the one hand, they are happy to see a surge in nationalistic pride. On the other hand, however, Malaysia does not want to tarnish its trade relationship or stifle the influx of Chinese tourists into its borders. Ultimately, I expect the animosity will be contained within the confines of the virtual social media world without having any negative economic effects of any kind.
source: http://www.nytimes.com/2014/03/28/world/asia/chinas-missing-flight-malaysian-backlash.html?ref=china&_r=0
I think all players could have done better here. The US, China, and Malaysia would all have done well to enlist the help of independent satellite and GPS companies earlier. Mistakes were made.
Indeed there were a lot of Chinese in the plane, but is it Malaysia’s fault?
I guess the problem (or the issue) is “who to blame?” However, I think we should focus on finding the crashed plane first.
I believe that the rarity and uniqueness of this situation also plays into the animosity. Specifically, no one definitively knew exactly where the plane crashed for quite some time. This leaves the question as to who is responsible for leading the investigation, which could be any number of parties considering the number of countries involved.
If anything whatever country was in charge of the investigation should be blamed, or at least pointed to. But to blame Malaysia simply because their name is on the plane isn’t justified. But like all riots and public disturbances, the facts are often not the most important thing to a mob.
It’s a big media event, and a controlled media invites conspiracy theories. But Malasia doesn’t have a passle of satellites of its own, and until they got data from other countries suggesting the plane had turned around, they were working on the obvious assumption that the plane had gone down where the signals stopped. With hindsight the search lost a lot of time, but it’s hard to blame anyone other than the person who turned off the plane’s transponders. I was also a bit skeptical about how quickly the Chinese government cleared all of their citizens as being clearly innocent. With China’s culture of cowboy capitalism, surely shady citizens were among those killed.