By MINZHU JIAO
South China Sea Correspondent
BEIJING (China Daily Show) – A legal award delivered to China’s Foreign Ministry by a UN tribunal is “full of spiders, and crap,” a spokesman told reporters.
The parcel of “so-called documents” from the international court at The Hague, rejecting many of China’s territorial claims in the South China Sea, is said to have caused widespread revulsion among ministry officials.
“We were very surprised to see such a rampant disregard of international customs and postal law,” Foreign Minister Wang Yi told media.
“Before we received the ruling, we knew there’d be spiders and stuff like that. But there were just so many spiders.”
So far, no other individual or government department that has received or downloaded the documents has reported the presence of any arachnids. But many in China have taken this as ironclad proof of a well-coordinated conspiracy.
“We remain resolute,” said Wang. “There were spiders, loads of them – just, all up in it.”
Legal experts in Beijing have acted quickly to refute the claims by refusing to read them.
“How could we look at the so-called documents?” a government lawyer said. “You can’t even read them for all the spiders.”
The lawyer also refuted any suggestion that China’s bellicose stance and disregard for law has rendered Beijing incapable of mounting an effective defence based on historical fact or legal precedent.
“It’s nothing to do with any of that,” the legal source scoffed. “How can any ruling that’s riddled with webbing, discarded insect husks, pupae, egg sacs and huge quantities of live spiders not be considered null and void?”
The Supreme People’s Court, meanwhile, has issued a statement that “China is resolutely a country under rule of law. Not rule of spiders.”
A spokesman for China’s Ambassador to the UN has claimed the spiders have “damaged the reputation of the court internationally, and exposed the West’s provocations. We were firm about the ruling but with the spiders, all the spiders? What’s with that?”
Representatives at The Hague, meanwhile, strenuously deny the existence of any spiders within the report. A spokesman told China Daily Show that this was the first such complaint in the court’s entire history.
“We had a problem with the Gambians once, but that was over some .docx files, because they only had Windows ’97,” said the representative. “Frankly, I don’t knew even know how spiders could appear in an email attachment.”
At the time of press, however, a representative from Papua New Guinea had also alleged seeing the spiders. Meanwhile, another diplomat from Zimbabwe is said to have screamed there are now thousands of them, crawling under his skin.
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