A national pastime with international meaning

In America, October means the World Series, which crowns one team as the world champion of baseball. Of course, as baseball is America's national sport, 'world' to us means 29 American teams plus one from Canada. Yet, defying American provincialism, the language of baseball applies to everything, everywhere - even in China.

I doubt, for example, that the Chinese president has ever held a baseball bat, but Deborah Brautigam, in her book about China and Africa, wrote that 'China would step up to the plate' when President Hu Jintao pledged to commit huge sums of money to developing countries. Home plate, which in early baseball resembled a dinner plate, is where the batter stands when it is his turn, so 'stepping up to the plate' means taking responsibility.

On the other hand, when Yu Jianhua of China's Ministry of Commerce responded to American economic proposals at the G20 meeting in Seoul last year, one headline read 'Obama Strikes Out'. That is, the American president failed even to touch the ball with his bat.

Baseball metaphors migrated almost unnoticed across the Pacific. When China invests in multiple energy technologies - wind, solar and clean coal - The Australian says it is 'attempting to cover all its bases', that is, to station a defending player at each of the four corners of the playing field.

Elle Kwan used the same metaphor in this paper last month when she wrote that a restaurant 'covers all the bases' by offering 'high chairs and Disney plate sets, and an oyster bar and prosecco for adults'.

Touching all the bases is something quite different - that is when a player on the offence proceeds to first, second and third base and then returns to home plate to score a run. When then Taiwanese president Lee Teng-hui declared that mainland China must deal with Taiwan on a state-to-state basis, at once immobilising his political opposition, infuriating Beijing and alarming Washington, a Singapore newspaper described his gambit as a 'touch-all-bases move ... brilliant in conception, execution, and timing'.