Last week the Shanghai Daily published an opinion piece accusing the United States government of a dastardly plot to defraud the Chinese people through a disguised default on its foreign debt.
The author's argument was simple: China has lent hundreds of billions of US dollars to America in good faith. In return Washington is reneging on its side of the deal and cynically ripping off the Chinese people by depreciating its currency so it does not have to pay back the full value of the money it borrowed.
'The US is actually welshing on its debts malignantly by allowing the devaluation of US dollars,' wrote the author Mei Xinyu, a senior researcher at the Ministry of Commerce.
And to make sure readers understood the point, the article was helpfully accompanied by a four panel cartoon depicting a smiling Chinese entrusting a sackful of walnuts to an American, who greedily scoffs the lot before returning the sack containing only empty and broken shells.
'China's US dollar assets are the money earned by its people through hard work, so the central government has the obligation to preserve them rather than allowing the depreciation of US dollars,' the author thundered, before calling on Beijing to resist any further depreciation of the US currency at the next session of the US-China special economic dialogue in June.
On a superficial level, it might seem as if the author has a valid complaint. After all, in recent years China has indeed lent vast sums of money to the US. According to figures from the US Treasury, China now holds almost US$500 billion of US government debt (see the first chart below), although most independent analysts believe the true amount to be far higher. In total, it is likely that Beijing holds around US$1 trillion of its foreign reserves in the form of US dollar-denominated assets.