If we were to see someone in public frothing at the mouth and displaying obvious signs of insanity, we’d quickly call an ambulance or the police. That’s not an option, however, when the lunatic under observation is the Chinese government, holding forth about Japan to the lamp post and bewildered passersby.

Think I’m exaggerating? Then try this Reuters article from the Courier-Mail in Australia reporting on an editorial in the People’s Daily:

China has an old saying: “One pellet of rat s..it spoils a bowl of soup,” said the commentary, signed by Wu Ming, probably a pseudonym. “Using this sentence with the Yasukuni Shrine is perhaps not correct because the shrine is not good soup, but it is notorious regardless of whether it has rat faeces.”

It’s not online, but the Japan Times included more direct quotes from Reuters and the People’s Daily than did the Courier-Mail, as well as the letter of the alphabet the Queensland daily removed:

”A sane man knowing the soup contains rat shit drinks it anyway. Other people try politely to stop him and he blames them. People can only think he has a special interest in rat shit.”

Any flicker of sanity in those sentences, much less a passing acquaintance with reality, is purely coincidental. I have to wonder if the pollution in China is now so bad that the drinking water has been contaminated by mercury.

It’s no surprise the Chinese public loses all sense of control when the issue is Japan. If all I had to read was the People’s Daily, I’d have to be fitted for a straitjacket, too.

The Courier-Mail did include one sentence that was puzzling in a different way. I can’t decide whether it more closely resembles Stalinism as depicted by Orwell or the Big Lie as propounded by Goebbels:

“The Yasukuni Shrine has long been regarded as a symbol of the revival of militarism,” the commentary said.

Any revival of militarism in Japan is a figment of the imagination of the propaganda arm of the Communist Party in China, deliberately used by the Chinese leadership to deflect the nation’s attention from the problems at home by focusing them on a bogeyman abroad. If the Chinese actually think they see any militaristic revival–other than their own–it’s evidence they’re hallucinating.

But that’s not the only symptom of illness. Here’s how Reuters describes the strategy of the government and the People’s Daily:

The People’s Daily has been stepping up its rhetoric against Japan even as the Government tries to keep public sentiment from boiling over.

Yes, turning up the heat on the stove is an excellent way to prevent the soup from spilling over the side of the pot.

Does this not suggest a split personality? See if this definition doesn’t fit the Chinese behavior as snugly as a hospital gown:

Schizophrenia is the most severe of the major mental illnesses. Symptoms of schizophrenia are divided into two categories – positive and negative. Positive symptoms are characterized by paranoia, delusions, hallucination and thought disorder.

Well, at least they get full marks for something.

But, as with all lunatics, even the Chinese have the occasional interlude of lucidity:

Last month, a paper’s columnist said China should prepare for enduring conflict with Japan and embrace nationalism as a source of unity, adding that tensions were likely to deepen as the two compete for export markets and energy supplies.

When most countries start barging down the militarist path to empire, they usually fabricate some excuse based on an affront to national pride to hide the real reasons for their aggression. Prime Minister Koizumi’s visits to Yasukuni provide them with the excuse. But the Chinese want to have their cake and eat it, too. Not only are they trying to whip up their natural nationalist arrogance—which they seldom try to disguise in Asia—to an even greater level of insufferability, they suggest a conflict is in the cards because they’re going to try to grab the region’s energy supplies on the way to establishing a hegemony.

Now that I think of it, the “enduring conflict” expression has more of an Orwellian ring.

Meanwhile, the village idiots of the Western press are burying these stories inside the paper without comment, or trying to maintain an air of neutrality (while subtly tilting against free market and democratic Japan) even as they wipe the Chinese faeces off their faces. Or spoon it out of their soup along with the rat s..t.

Why do these self-proclaimed defenders of truth and justice refrain from calling a spade a spade just because the spade is made in China? Perhaps this article answers the question—self-preservation. Here’s how the authorities deal with the media in that country.

A newspaper editor who was severely beaten by police about three months ago has died from multiple injuries, his wife and former colleagues said on Monday.

…Mr Wu’s wife, who did not want to give her first name but is also surnamed Wu, confirmed his death, although she declined to elaborate exactly what he had died of.

“I am not able to say,” she said. “It is not convenient for me to say over the phone… in the end, it was due to his liver problems.”

Up to 50 police raided the newspaper’s office on October 20, a day after it published an article criticising traffic police over charging arbitrary fees for electrical bicycle licenses. Up to eight police beat and kicked Mr Wu, before hurling him out of his office and bundling him into a police car, Xinhua reported the next day. The Xinhua report said Mr Wu had a liver transplant two years earlier and the beating caused severe damage to his liver, as well as other injuries.

Another journalist at Taizhou Wanbao, who also declined to be named, said Mr Wu had remained in hospital following the beatings on October 20. He added that newspaper staff had been warned against discussing the incident with outsiders.

“All the news that’s fit to print,” they tell us. What they really mean is, “All the news that keeps us fit, we’ll print.”