Acclaimed author Lung Yingtai felt the force of China's soft power when she spoke in New York this week on her first trip as Taiwan's culture minister aiming to win friends for the isolated island.
Lung, whose best-selling book on China's civil war is banned by the mainland government, had a firewall put around her name on the Chinese Internet almost immediately after she spoke at the Asia Society on Tuesday. She had pleaded, ironically, that culture should not be used as a "weapon." "Supposedly after the talk, my name was blocked from inside China," Lung told AFP in an interview. "I don't know why. Probably, it has something to do with the use of the word weapon."
Internet users in China confirmed that the name of the minister, who only switched from writer to minister in May, could not be accessed.
In her personal life and as a writer, Lung, 59, has lived much of Taiwan's agonising drama since the division of China in 1949 between the communist and nationalist camps.
Her parents fled to Taiwan at the end of the civil war, leaving behind Lung's baby brother. When they received a letter from their son in China years later, her parents "whispered in the back room, they cried all night and in the morning they burned the letter," Lung told the Asia Society audience. Her parents did not dare write back. "During those days, to write to the other side might bring a death penalty," Lung recalled.