Via Taiwan News:
A Taiwanese woman working as a waitress in a hot pot restaurant in Sydney, Australia was fired by her Chinese boss after she refused to agree with his statement that Taiwan is part of China, reported Apple Daily.
On her Facebook page, a waitress, who media have only identified by the first name of Winnie, said that she had been working at a Chinese restaurant in Sydney called Hutong Hotpot (胡同涮肉). One day, she received a walkie-talkie message from her Chinese boss, who she described as “Mr. Ha,” saying “Can I ask you a question?”
She responded, “please speak.” He then said, “Does Taiwan belong to China?” She quickly responded “Definitely not!”
After twenty minutes went by, he informed her, “You can leave work now.”
Confused, Winnie asked her mainly Chinese coworkers if this was real or a fake, and they laughed at her in response. When Winnie turned in her walkie-talkie and uniform for the day at the main desk, she asked Ha if she would expected to work for the next few days. To which he responded, “No, there is no need for you to come. Pick up your pay on Saturday.”
Ha then kicked Winnie out of the Wechat group for the restaurant and soon found another new hire to take her place.
On her Facebook post, Winnie wrote,
“That day, in addition to being dumbfounded, I was also speechless. I consider myself a hardworking and conscientious person. Every time I apply for a job, I get hired right on the spot. Whether Taiwan is part of China or not, that is not related to my work.”
Winnie closed by saying, “Although I was upset, I’m happy now that I won’t be wasting any more of my time with that boss.”
Something in that for every Australian. Including Rupert Murdoch it seems, from Crikey today:
Was Rupert Murdoch married to a Chinese spy for 14 years — and was he lured into a “honey trap” by her while still married to Anna Murdoch?
If this all sounds like the stuff of fiction, consider the extraordinary revelations about Murdoch and former wife Wendi Deng Murdoch over the past day:
The Wall Street Journal (controlled by Murdoch) is reporting that the FBI believes Deng could be acting in the interests of China, and warned Donald Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner earlier this year that US counter-intelligence officials believed Deng, now a prominent Chinese-American businesswoman, could be using her close friendship with Mr Kushner and his wife, Ivanka Trump, to further the interests of the Chinese government.
Michael Wolff, author of Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House as well as a 2008 book about Rupert Murdoch (The Man Who Owns the News), tweeted yesterday that Murdoch himself had made similar claims in the past:
According to the Journal, the FBI believes that Ms Deng-Murdoch may have been lobbying for the US$100 million construction of a Chinese garden in Washington funded by the Chinese government. Officials’ were concerned that a 21 metre tower built as part of the gardens could be used for surveillance.
Murdoch and Deng met in 1997. They were introduced by Australian journalist and media executive Bruce Dover, who later wrote the book Rupert’s Adventures In China (published by Viking). Here’s how Dover described their first meeting:
“ I had introduced Murdoch to Wendi at a cocktail party at Hong Kong’s Harbour Plaza Hotel just before the July 1, 1997 handover celebrations. As an introduction, it was pretty straightforward: ‘Murdoch, this is Wendi Deng. Wendi is working with us in business development in China.’ Wendi was a Yale MBA graduate who had been with STAR TV less than a year. She was tall, attractive, intelligent, vivacious and confident, and immediately had the chief executive’s full attention. After the cocktail party, on the way back to the hotel, he remarked how ‘impressive’ he found ‘the young Chinese women’ present at the function. ‘Intelligent and full of enthusiasm … they’re the people who will change China and make it a superpower to be reckoned with. They should be running the countrAt the time, writes Dover, “few of us … had any inclination that the relationship between Murdoch and Anna — after 30 years of marriage — was in serious trouble and headed for the rocks. I got an inkling once, when in the back of a limousine on the way from Beijing Airport to the hotel Murdoch was having a ‘yes dear’ conversation with Anna on the mobile phone, rolling his eyes upwards and frowning a lot. After the conversation had finished, he turned and said: ‘She wants me to slow down, spend time at home, go to all these silly functions … Makes me feel I’m getting to be an old man or something’.” In the book Dover chronicles how the romance between Murdoch and Deng blossomed almost overnight. He describes Deng as hardworking and eager to learn, but also ambitious and single-minded in her desire to succeed.” She impressed everyone with “her energy, good humour and wit” and her “extraordinary ability to absorb information like a sponge, then process and regurgitate it … well aware of her charms, she was flirtatious with the mainly male executive coterie around her at STAR, and a good number of them were actively vying for her attention.”
And the book explains in detail how the Murdoch-Dengs, who married in 1999, worked assiduously to court the Chinese government, built a sumptuous house for themselves in Beijing and constantly tried to expand the News Corp empire in China.
