When China expelled three Wall Street Journal reporters recently, it was an unprecedented move and it was not even over a story they had written.
Walter Russell Mead's opinion piece, "China is the Real Sick Man of Asia," touched several sore spots for the Chinese Communist Party. It alluded to China's "century of humiliation," when Western powers had humbled it. It criticized the CCP's "less than impressive" management of the coronavirus crisis. And it widened that criticism to encompass "malfeasance" in China's state-led financial markets.