On the radio recently, I was called a 'pro-China stooge'. The term tickled a basic human trait in me - curiosity - although some would argue that China stooges are not human. I mulled over the term, trying to define its exact meaning. A friend e-mailed to say that being called a China stooge was a compliment. Still unsure, I asked a diplomat acquaintance to define the term. He defined it by dissecting it.
Being called pro-China, he explained, is quite harmless. It can mean anything. You can call someone pro-China for liking China the country, its culture, its cuisine, its people. But it gets tricky when you label someone a 'pro-China stooge'. The nuance changes dramatically. You can only be a stooge of something or someone that is generally considered bad, like Batman's arch foe, the Joker. You wouldn't, for example, be called a stooge of Mother Teresa. But you could quite easily be called a Saddam Hussein stooge.
Therefore, the diplomat explained, whoever mocks you as a China stooge is actually mocking China. It's not really about you. You're just a puppet of a place that is considered bad. That threw up more questions than answers. Is China bad? Who decides what is good or bad? What standards are used? How are those standards set?
There was no such thing as a George W. Bush stooge until the September 11 attacks redefined him. His Iraq invasion and torture of terror suspects made him bad.
His British accomplice, then-prime minister Tony Blair, had an even worse time of it. Not only were his supporters Blair stooges, he himself was dubbed a Bush stooge, although the preferred term in his case was Mr Bush's lapdog, or butler as the former Hong Kong governor Chris Patten once told me.
But note that the stooge labels in both cases were linked to leaders, not the countries they led. Supporters were called Bush and Blair stooges, not American or British stooges. So why China stooge instead of Hu Jintao or Communist Party stooge? Can all of China, with its 1.3 billion people, be bad? It's also worth noting that only English-speakers here use the China stooge label. The Chinese say 'leftist', which is directed at the Communist Party rather than their country.