FEW countries have invested more man-hours in suppressing awkward facts than China. Internet censors employ more foot-soldiers than some armies. Propaganda officials are so strict that, lest instructions faxed to newsrooms leak, they issue some orders to squelch stories by telephone, to be recorded by hand.

Yet the rules do not bind all equally. The Global Times is a jingoistic tabloid that tackles topics shunned by rivals, even though it is a subsidiary of the Communist Party mouthpiece, the important-but-turgid People’s Daily. In July it reported that Liu Xia, the widow of the Nobel-winning dissident Liu Xiaobo, had left for Germany. Recently it has ignored orders to downplay tensions with America and has offered defiant candour about Xinjiang, a restive western region turned police state. There is mounting evidence that hundreds of thousands of Muslims from Xinjiang’s Uighur minority have been sent to re-education camps for such acts as public prayer or reading history books. Even as Chinese spokesmen denied the camps’ existence, the Global Times, in its English-language edition, acknowledged “counter-terrorism education” among Xinjiang residents and work to “rectify” the thinking of imprisoned extremists. Whether the way Xinjiang is run violates human rights “must be judged by whether its results safeguard the interests of the majority in the region”, said the Global Times in August. Its editor, Hu Xijin, tweeted that Xinjiang had been saved from becoming “another Chechnya, Syria or Libya”.

Strikingly, rather than claiming that Western journalists misreport Xinjiang, the Global Times prefers to troll them, accusing foreign correspondents of hoping to “profit” from negative China coverage, while asserting that the Western press is “nowhere near as influential as it once was” and gleefully noting Mr Trump’s attacks on “fake news”. If that sounds familiar, it should. This populist, nationalist age suits the Global Times and its Trumpian instinct that the best defences are brazen ones: coolly conceding opponents’ facts while attacking their motives and standing.

It is not fashionable in China to take the Global Times seriously. Mention it at dinner with Chinese intellectuals and fireworks follow. They deplore its sabre-rattling towards Taiwan and Japan, and its deep reservoirs of grievance (this week the paper peddled a largely confected tale accusing Swedish police of brutalising some rowdy Chinese tourists). In 2016 a retired Chinese ambassador compared it to an angry toddler. Xiang Lanxin of the Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies in Geneva, a former Global Times columnist who left because of its nationalism, has written that it would be a “great shame” if history were to equate the tabloid with Der Stürmer, a hate-filled Nazi rag. On Weibo, a microblog site where Mr Hu has 15.7m followers, critics call him “Frisbee catcher”, ie, a lapdog chasing stories tossed his way. Foreign diplomats wonder whether the paper floats trial balloons for party hardliners, or simply pursues profit.

Asked that question at his office, in a drab block on the People’s Daily campus in Beijing, Mr Hu suggests a bit of both. “If the People’s Daily and the Central Publicity Department don’t like me, they can assign me elsewhere with just one order,” he says. Yet his paper lives off circulation and advertising, so “the party and readers are both my gods.” The paper’s Chinese edition sells 1.5m copies a day, says the managing editor, Yao Li. The English edition, launched in 2009, claims sales of 120,000. Its foreign reports are often by correspondents from the People’s Daily and Xinhua, the state news agency. Some hawkish commentaries are written by military and government officials under pseudonyms.

Before Mr Hu writes editorials, staff collect views from “prestige, mainstream” experts and officials. Pressed on whether he tests messages for those in power, he frowns, trying to answer precisely. For, to give him credit, Mr Hu is exceptionally willing to talk to outsiders, on social media and in person. His articles may reflect how officials “truly feel”, he says, though such thoughts may not represent government policy. The paper tries to push controversial topics in a way that might coincide with leaders’ thinking. “The knack is knowing when would be a good time.”

The paper is profitable. “If we make ten yuan, we give the People’s Daily three yuan and 50 cents,” says Ms Yao. Mr Hu has a political mission, too: to nudge the party to be more transparent for its own good. The young Mr Hu took part in the Tiananmen protests in 1989. Mention of that tumult is taboo in the Chinese press but Global Times has written about it, in defence of the government. No one will say the army was right to kill hundreds in order to end the unrest, Mr Hu murmurs. “The words cannot even be uttered.” He calls the military action a tragedy caused by student naivety and government inexperience. But after watching the Soviet Union’s collapse and covering Yugoslavia’s break-up as a war correspondent, he came to admire strong Communist rule.

In answer to Pilate’s question

Mr Hu’s candour is selective, notably when tackling domestic news. “In China what is truth?” he asks. “Micro-truth” is whether a particular incident happened. But his “macro-truth” is that the media must guide the public to see that its interests and the party’s are fundamentally aligned. “China is so vast, if we report on corruption every day we won’t see the end to it.”

Twenty years ago liberal papers like Southern Weekly pushed at censors’ boundaries. Today propaganda officials grant a rare licence to Mr Hu, and indeed sound positively fond of him in private. His pugnacity is catching. On September 13th Li Xiaojun, from the State Council Information Office, told reporters at a UN human-rights meeting that Xinjiang had to send extremists to vocational “training centres” because the West had failed to tackle Islamic extremism. “Look at Belgium, look at Paris, look at some other European countries,” Mr Li scolded, sounding like the Global Times come to life—or like a man using a propaganda line tested on Western critics by Mr Hu. Frisbees can fly two ways.