China: So Big, So Sensitive

For a country aiming for superpower status, with 1.3 billion citizens and a standing army of 2.5 million, China certainly gets its feelings hurt a lot.

With the Dalai Lama, China's bête noir, traipsing around Taiwan to comfort those afflicted by Typhoon Morakot, China's reaction so far has been astonishingly muted, given Beijing's usual response to the Tibetan religious leader's incursions into the Chinese political sphere. When China feels offended – more often than not over a visit by the Dalai Lama to somewhere, the Foreign Ministry's diplomatic response almost invariably contains the words "hurt feelings" to describe the damage done to the Chinese people.

By actual count, according to Fang Kecheng, a Chinese blogger and journalism master's degree candidate at Peking University and others who keep count, China's feelings have been hurt officially at least 140 times by at least 42 countries as obscure as Iceland and Guatemala as well as a bunch of organizations since the Communists threw out the Kuomintang in 1949. The government, the bloggers think, ought to give up the phrase because it makes them look weak.