Alidad

I mean no disrespect when I say that the Chinese smell of piss and look like rats and nobody likes them. It almost sounds like an unpleasant, racist remark. Sabotaging climate talks, polluting the earth ten times over, running a slave-labour economy and becoming the friend and counsellor of evil, rat-piss dictators around the world is no reason surely to dislike an entire nation. But I am a little unreasonable on this count.

I have an incurable detestation of communist states and communists, including Iranian communists, and see them as the embodiment of evil; they are, I am convinced - and a little more every day - the agents of Satan. So sue me.

I feel China was admirable in many ways until about 1949. It had law and order problems certainly in the 1930s, what with warlordism, near civil-war conditions, and heinous acts likely being committed by bandits, mafiosi and feudal landlords - much like modern Afghanistan or other troublesome places that cost tax-payers' money. Yet they still had respect for human institutions like the family, parents, cooking, religion... They behaved with greater respect toward Tibet, with whom they shared religious beliefs. Today: it's all dark cells and prison-like conditions, harrowing screams, weeping, a kind of chaos amid rising steam - and I'm not talking about the massage parlour near my house. However we need to study China as an emerging superpower.

An abusive and vindictive article on China is hardly constructive, especially when you immediately compare it to the high-quality items in Foreign Policy, Foreign Affairs or WetBoobs. Alright, I never heard of the first two journals. It doesn't help us understand them: why do they smell of onions? Is it the big white onions they eat? A dear friend was saying "food" is now made in China. She said she was deterred from picking frozen rabbit, made in China, at a British supermarket. Whether the frozen item was rabbit or dissenting members of a Chinese choir, she did the right thing.

Now if I may return to a more didactic and objective tone in my analysis of modern China: it is a very large piece of excrement.