Several years ago, in an overheated room in Beijing, I was forced to endure a stern lecture from a Chinese foreign ministry official. My sin: As the editor at The Wall Street Journal responsible for the paper’s overseas opinion sections, I had apparently insulted the entire Chinese people by publishing the work of a “well-known terrorist” — the courageous Uighur human-rights activist Rebiya Kadeer.

I had to clench my jaw to suppress the rejoinder that China’s best-known tyrant, Mao Zedong, has his portrait overlooking the killing field known as Tiananmen Square.

I thought of that episode this week on hearing Wednesday’s news that the Chinese government has decided to expel three Wall Street Journal reporters based in China — two Americans and an Australian — in retaliation for the headline of an opinion column by Walter Russell Mead, “China Is the Real Sick Man of Asia.” In a style reminiscent of my own experience, the Foreign Ministry issued a statement claiming, “The Chinese people do not welcome media that publish racist statements and smear China with malicious attacks.”

Any reader of Mead’s column, headline and text alike, will note that there isn’t an iota of racism in it, though it makes a devastating case about the ways in which the coronavirus epidemic has exposed the broader fragility of the Chinese system. And those familiar with The Wall Street Journal will know that the paper, like The Times, enforces a strict separation between its news and opinion sections — meaning the reporters facing expulsion had absolutely nothing to do with the writing and publication of Mead’s column.