Emotion and policy became harder to separate. When Chinese diplomats denounced the actions of another government, they often said it “hurt the feelings of the Chinese people.” They invoked this idea with increasing frequency; one journalist, Fang Kecheng, counted up those occasions and found that China’s feelings were hurt only three times between 1949 and 1978, but by the eighties and nineties it was happening an average of five times each year.
