Like primary school kids in the yard who know there are worse words but not what they are, you can almost see the cadres spittling it out, leaving lashings of saliva on their Great Wall spectacles.

It has to be appreciated though that, given the late Manchu condition of public sewage, this word has powerful overtones for the Mainland mind.

Since rude words are the currency of Anglo-Chinese trade and with the drains in mind, we had better balance out ''stinking colonialism'' with a counter accusation of ''flatulent feudalism.'' This will upset the Party something rotten.

On the rare occasions under communism when something goes wrong that has not actually been planned or peasants got so fed up of the planning, they do their own thing, The Party calls it ''feudalism''.

To accuse a cadre of propagating feudalism is a heinous insult on a par with telling him his suit fits. So there! Yeh! Boo! And I bet you daren't come into my part of the playground! Yet how does one explain the entire province of Guangxi? Just from reading the China pages of the newspaper you know that if you asked Stephen King to conjure up an undetected rural practice, macabre in the extreme, they'll top it in Guangxi.

For a while, cannibalism was the in-thing on a Friday night after the pubs shut.

Rising annual figures in Guangxi's woman and child slave trade are causing the Sudanese to glance over their shoulders.

A recent personality in the province has been the farmer who strangled his child and fed it to the pig because the little one had a broken nose and the cost of treatment would have wiped out his savings.

He remembered the old medieval saying: ''What use is a straight nose if you're broke yourself and the pig is feeling peckish?'' Freshest contenders though for the title of Famous Feudal Funny Farm Folk are the entire people of Chongqing, whose children refused to go to school and were allowed not to because they said an American-made robot - or zombie - was on the loose in the city devouring children dressed in red.

I could kick myself for not having come up with a ruse like that for my parents back in schooldays, ''Mum, Dad, there is a Chinese communist robot hanging around the car park at the back of The Wheatsheaf eating little boys in feudalistic schoolcaps.'' (They were compulsory wear in old Britain.) Unfortunately my parents' impression of China at the time was of an orientalised, vastly up-scaled, Welsh hills nature commune which rather undermined a credible robotics research programme.

Their direct experience of China was Hongkong toys. ''Never mind dear,'' they would have said, ''The clockwork will have wound down by the time you get to it but don't touch the nasty sharp edges.'' Apparently, the more gullible Chongqing parents could only get their children to go out protected by anti-zombie garlic.

Back in the 50s my conservative English mother would have given houseroom and a cream tea to a child-gobbling zombie rather than let a clove of that stinking foreign stuff through the door.

The Chongqing mayor has resorted to a crash education course on the realities of American robots.

All he needed to do was stick a baseball cap on it and announce the visit of the USS Nitzits Q. Zimmerframe. The mooring of a battleship in Chongqing would provide no obstacles to the imaginations of local parents.

If there is a famished fugitive robot out there who is finding the garlic a real problem, he should get himself over to the pig sties of Guangxi where the feeding is fine and he can buy himself a woman.

Stinking it certainly will be, but it sure beats colonialism.