translated from my original X post in Chinese

Lately, everyone seems to be asking the same question: Who, exactly, has been hurting the feelings of the Chinese people? Well, I have a few thoughts of my own.

French soccer superstar Kylian Mbappé recently managed to send the Chinese Communist Party into a fit of rage. His offense? Calling Mao Zedong a dictator. Beijing promptly accused him of “hurting the feelings of the Chinese people.”

But Mao WAS a dictator. His rule resulted in the deaths of tens of millions of Chinese. So here's a question worth asking: How can telling the truth about Mao hurt the Chinese people more than Mao himself did by sending so many of them to their graves?

The episode exposes one of the CCP's oldest political tricks: Criticize the Communist Party, and you're insulting China. Criticize Mao, and you're offending the Chinese people. Mao has been dead for half a century, but the dictatorship he built remains very much alive, and the Party still treats his political legacy as sacred ground.

We've all heard Beijing's favorite complaint. An American president meets the Dalai Lama? Chinese feelings are hurt. A Japanese prime minister talks about Taiwan? Hurt again. A foreign government condemns Beijing's human rights abuses? Another emotional injury to 1.4 billion Chinese.

Good grief! Are the Chinese people really that thin-skinned and fragile? More importantly, has anyone actually bothered to ask them?

Here is a government that won't let its citizens freely elect their leaders, openly criticize their rulers, or even speak their minds online without risking trouble. Yet somehow, it claims to know precisely what every Chinese citizen is feeling.

You have to admire the audacity.

This routine has been around for decades. The China Media Project traced the phrase "Hurting the feelings of the Chinese people" back to at least 1959, when the Communist Party's People's Daily accused India of hurting Chinese feelings during a border dispute. Researchers identified 143 relevant cases between 1959 and 2015, with Japan and the United States topping the list of alleged offenders.

The hypocrisy reached its peak in 1989. After the CCP sent troops into Beijing to crush and kill Chinese citizens demanding democratic reform, the U.S. Congress condemned the Tiananmen Square bloodshed. Beijing responded by accusing America of hurting the feelings of the Chinese people.

Think about that. Killing Chinese citizens doesn't hurt their feelings, but condemning those killings does?

Mao's Great Leap Forward had already caused a catastrophic famine, killing an estimated 30 million to 45 million Chinese. The Cultural Revolution then devastated families, institutions, and cultural heritage. Yet the Party that inflicted these disasters still claims to be the guardian of China's collective dignity.

And what about China today?

Millions face unemployment, economic insecurity, pervasive corruption, and intrusive political controls. Young people struggle to find opportunities; many dream of fleeing the countruy, while others simply give up and join the massive "lying flat" generation. Yet those who publicly challenge the government or demand accountability risk jail or worse.

Under the CCP's peculiar rules, Chinese feelings matter when foreigners supposedly hurt them. When the Party itself inflicts suffering, everyone is expected to keep quiet.

The Mbappé controversy illustrates how this works. Chinese media denounced his supposedly insulting remarks while hesitating to tell audiences exactly what he had said. Some internet users were expected to join the indignation without knowing the full story.

You're not allowed to know what someone said, but you're expected to be furious about it anyway.

Such outrage serves two purposes. At home, it redirects frustration over economic hardship, corruption, and political repression toward convenient foreign villains. Abroad, it turns China's enormous market into leverage against governments, businesses, universities, athletes, and entertainers who refuse to follow Beijing's political rules.

Remember 2019, when Houston Rockets general manager Daryl Morey posted a message supporting Hong Kong's pro-democracy protesters? Beijing responded with a furious campaign against the NBA. Foreign companies and public figures have faced similar threats for saying things Beijing dislikes about Taiwan, Tibet, and other sensitive subjects.

The message is unmistakable: You may enjoy freedom of speech in America, but if you want to make money in China, you'd better learn to keep the Communist Party happy.

This is censorship by commercial blackmail.

Beijing's habitual indignation also betrays a deeper insecurity. On Taiwan and other international disputes, it routinely issues thunderous warnings about “serious consequences.” Some threats are backed by action; others produce little beyond the rhetoric. The thunder is deafening; the rain, not so much.

China is unquestionably a major power. Yet Beijing simultaneously celebrates its unstoppable national rejuvenation and portrays its people as vulnerable to every foreign criticism. A genuinely confident country should not need to treat every unwelcome remark as a national emergency.

What really frightens the CCP is not wounded national pride, but the possibility that people might stop confusing the Communist Party with China itself.

That is why Beijing exploits China's historical humiliations so relentlessly. Foreign invasions, unequal treaties, and Japanese atrocities were genuine tragedies. But the Party encourages Chinese citizens to remember every foreign offense while discouraging scrutiny of its own disastrous record.

Beijing demands apologies for wrongs committed by foreign powers generations ago, yet refuses an honest public reckoning for the tens of millions who died under Communist rule. History becomes a political weapon, and foreign scapegoats become useful distractions whenever domestic discontent rises.

The trick depends on deliberately equating the Communist Party with China.

But China is not the Communist Party, and the Communist Party is not China. The two are not interchangeable, no matter how insistently Beijing pretends otherwise.

For Americans, there is a straightforward lesson: Stop apologizing to dictators for exercising our freedoms.

Beijing has no right to dictate what Americans may say, what our universities may teach, what our businesses may publish, or which historical facts may be discussed.

The CCP has become clever about exporting censorship. It doesn't need to write American laws. It merely dangles access to the Chinese market, and plenty of American institutions rush to do the censoring for it.

Hollywood studios alter scripts to protect Chinese box-office revenues. Universities tiptoe around sensitive subjects. Companies restrict employee speech to protect business interests. Professional sports leagues issue groveling apologies over political statements that are entirely lawful in the United States.

This is more than another diplomatic quarrel. A foreign dictatorship is using commercial leverage to import its political rules into American life, persuading people in a free society to surrender their own freedom of expression.

We should expose Beijing's economic coercion, defend Americans facing retaliation for lawful speech, and make one thing unmistakably clear: No matter how large the Chinese market becomes, it cannot buy the right to decide what Americans are allowed to say.

Above all, we must reject the Party's biggest political lie: that its interests are identical to those of China and the Chinese people.

The real insult to the Chinese people is not that someone called Mao Zedong a dictator. It is that a political party responsible for the deaths of tens of millions, the suppression of historical truth, and the systematic denial of basic freedoms still has the gall to present itself as the guardian of the Chinese people's feelings.

Instead of lecturing the world about offending China, Beijing might begin by explaining how much suffering the Communist Party itself has inflicted on the Chinese people.

And who gave the CCP the exclusive right to decide what the Chinese people should feel in the first place? Certainly not the Chinese people, who have never been given a free vote on the matter.

In the end, the CCP isn't protecting the feelings of the Chinese people. It is holding those feelings hostage.

The greatest injury to China's dignity doesn't come from foreigners who criticize the Communist Party.

It comes from the Communist Party itself.