The meaning of the word criticism (or piping 批评) in Chinese refers to pointing out merits and defects, or to give some idea of one's perception of good and bad. But the word is especially associated with raising an opinion about mistakes and drawbacks. In any form or shape, 批评 is not something taken lightly, with its close proximity to humiliation and confrontation. A much better way to raise a concern in China is 忠告, zhong gao: to give sincere advice or recommendation.

According to Olympics chief Jacques Rogge, piping is 'a big mistake of people in the west': you don't obtain anything in China with a loud voice. Urging the west to stop hectoring China over human rights, Rogge called for a bit more modesty:

It took us 200 years to evolve from the French Revolution. China started in 1949...

The Games, he believed, will over time

have a good influence on social evolution in China, and the Chinese admit it themselves.

Yet by famously describing the Chinese government as 'goons and thugs', Jack Cafferty made just this mistake when he directed some provocative piping at China on CNN. The news channel then made an even bigger mistake when it said that Cafferty's remarks were not directed at the Chinese people but just at its government. A fatal error. Finding itself at the vanguard of some severe counter-piping from China for anything from biased reporting to downright arrogance and stupidity, CNN has become such a popular target that an amateur song called 'Don't be too CNN' has become a hit on the Internet, and anti-CNN T-shirts have gone on sale in the same vein as the political T-shirts that appeared in China in the early 1990s with cynical messages like 'I'm fed up! Leave me alone' (Danwei). Reflecting the deep-seated resentment against 'biased' foreign criticism of China and perceived deliberate attempts to damage China's hosting of the Games, the song does not return the favor with zhong gao:

Don't believe that lies will become mottos if they are repeated a thousand times... What's the purpose of racking your brains to turn fraud into truth. Don't be like CNN. I would rather believe you silly and innocent.

Considering what happened to CNN, one can only shudder at the thought of what would happen if someone in China got hold of Fox news.

In response to some recent uncivilized and brutish behavior of young Chinese people and the gratuitously lumping of everyone in the west with the shortcomings of CNN, one young American in China recently posted online 18 points of advice to young Chinese people, pointing out the fallacies of angry, irrational protest and absolute statements, as well as the value of friendly debate based on facts and logic. And as for people like Jack Cafferty, Lou Dobbs and Bill O'Reilly, he cautions, they say silly and offensive things all the time, and whenever they something offensive about China the best response for Chinese people is to 'roll your eyes.'

Yet Chinese reactions to foreign criticism in regard to the Olympics, Tibet and biased media reporting have included much more than rolling eyes, and according to opinions raised at the Time China blog, the fierceness of the Chinese response is connected with a 'victim mindset' in China. Most Chinese

both personally and collectively think this is a huge opportunity to show the world that China has finally recovered from some two hundred years of national humiliation. You may criticize this victim mindset, but this is just the reality of today's China...Hosting a successful Olympics will help them finally turn a page in their mind, gain self-confidence and thus pave the way for a long-delayed intellectual reconciliation between China and the West.

Hence the enormous weight of Chinese expectations about the Games and what they signify makes this a particularly difficult time for randomly dishing out piping at China.

So while reflecting on the aggressive outbursts, nationalistic campaigns, online fearmongering and us-and-them convulsions that have characterized piping's poisoning of China's Olympic year, we may well expound on the sincere advice of China Vice-premier Wang Qishan, who last week urged leaders in central China to further liberate their thinking and speed up reform and opening up economically. Encouraging the provinces to break regional barriers and open wider to the outside world to form a vigorous economic regime, Wang emphasized that "it's important to transform minds and make bolder moves in system reforms."

Words of Zhong gao, not piping - an obvious choice in China.