Wen follows Bush; escapes shoe missile at Cambridge

03 February 2009

Fresh from the Beijing Olympics, shoe hurlers have classified former US President George Bush and Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao as perfect targets to hone their shoe hurling skills; a protestor hurled a shoe at Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao, who was in the middle of his speech, at Cambridge University in the UK yesterday.

After blowing a whistle and calling the Chinese Premier a ''dictator'', the protestor threw a shoe at him (no, unlike Bush, Wen did not comment on the shoe size), which missed the Chinese Premier and the angry young man was quickly removed from the audience of 200 by surprised security guards.

News agency AFP reported that when the student attempted to interrupt the speech, Cambridge proctors asked him to stop shouting and sit down. The protestor continued, took off a shoe and hurled it towards the stage, before being led away by constables.

"The shouting was legitimate protest but throwing a shoe is something different," a proctor told AFP.

The shoe was thrown from a fair distance as the protestor was standing at the back of the hall and it missed Wen, who did not have to duck like Bush when the Iraqi television reporter Muntazer al-Zaidi, hurled a size 10 shoe (according to Bush who had famously quipped, "All I can report is a size 10.") at him in Baghdad during a farewell press conference on 14 December (See: Bush discovers WMD in Baghdad - no consolation prize, though). 

Wen, who was on a three-day official visit to the UK after attending the World Economic Forum annual meeting at Davos, had signed a number of trade agreements with the UK Prime Minister Gordon Brown.