Who would have thought that, all of a sudden, China would find itself back on the rogue-nation list? Just when the world seemed to have edged away from judging it purely on human rights grounds, it is open season once again on the country. Gone are the gushing phrases describing China as the next economic superpower. In their place is a new 'bash Beijing' industry spawned by the Tibet uprising which has lent legitimacy to anyone who wants to take a swing.
And the swings have been coming hard and fast in the past weeks - from the worn rhetoric about human rights and the knee in the groin by the Paris City Council which made the Dalai Lama an honorary citizen, to the cheap shot by CNN commentator Jack Cafferty who called the Chinese 'goons and thugs'.
Western leaders even widened this grandstanding by taking a swing at China's arms sales, thereby putting themselves on thin ice. An indignant United States took issue with Beijing's boatload of weapons to Zimbabwe, while a morally incensed European Parliament condemned its arms sales to 'oppressive' African regimes.
How are we to react to all this? Do we choose sides as US President George W. Bush once forced us to with his 'you're either with us or with the terrorists' outburst following the attacks of September 11, 2001? Can we choose China without being on the wrong side of morality, or will we be labelled Beijing's apologists by critics with a blinkered world view?
That view is grounded on the insistence that all things moral flow from western democracies which are free to move the goalposts to suit their circumstances.
It was once wrong to detain suspects indefinitely without trial but we now have Guantanamo Bay. It was once wrong to torture suspects, but we now have top US officials writing rules on how to torture. Free expression was once a cherished value, but you now risk being thrown in a British jail for wearing a T-shirt supporting Osama bin Laden.
It was fine to arm Iraq's Saddam Hussein to the teeth for him to invade Iran and gas Iranians to death, but he suddenly became a monstrous dictator when he invaded oil-rich western ally Kuwait.