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Liar, coward or hypocrite? It’s hard to say, given the amusing discrepancies between the official embassy translator’s account of the inanities People’s Republic of China ambassador Lu Shaye uttered during an interview last Friday with Canadian Press reporters Mike Blanchfield and Andy Blatchford, and the account contained in the official transcript of the conversation the embassy later produced.

Besides, lying, cowardice and hypocrisy — all three — are the key prerequisites for the job Lu occupied immediately prior to his appointment to Ottawa in February. He was the Director General of the Policy Research Bureau of the Foreign Affairs Department of the Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Party. So he would know what he was doing, and how to do it.

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The gist of Lu’s long complaint, going by the reliably stenography-standard Canadian Press account: powerful, ill-informed and “even prejudiced” Canadian journalists persist in taking an unfairly dim view of the Beijing dictatorship, and Canadian politicians “bow before media,” and so the prospects for a Canada-China free-trade agreement (a third round of “exploratory” talks resume in a few days) are being unduly impaired by the clutter of backchat about democracy and human rights.