Julia writes:

Sorry to trouble you, but I have a question regarding insulting remarks against the Chinese on April 9 made by Jack Cafferty, one of commentators of CNN. He said: "We're in hawk to the Chinese up to our eyeballs because of the in Iraq...." What's "in hawk to"? And what does "up to our eyeballs" function?

My comments:

First of all, I never hesitate to comment on an interesting question, or one that I think is of general interest. So therefore, never mind the "trouble", just fire away.

Jack Cafferty called the Chinese "goons and thugs" in his comments, which have drawn the ire from many Chinese bloggers over the Internet. However, "in hawk" is not what that hateful man said. What that hateful man said was "in hock", meaning "in debt". China has been buying American Treasury bonds, which is one of the issues that had led Mr. Cafferty to rave, in full:

"I don't know if China is any different, but our relationship with China is certainly different."

"We're in hock to the Chinese up to our eyeballs because of the war in Iraq, for one thing. They're holding hundreds of billions of dollars worth of our paper. We are also running hundreds of billions of dollars' worth of trade deficits with them, as we continue to import their junk with the lead paint on them and the poisoned pet food and export, you know, jobs to places where you can pay workers a dollar a month to turn out the stuff that we're buying from Wal-Mart."

'So I think our relationship with China has certainly changed. I think they're basically the same bunch of goons and thugs they've been for the last 50 years."

Cafferty's remarks say a lot about CNN and the mainstream Western media in general. They also tell a lot of course about how little Mr. Cafferty understands what he's talking about. It was ungracious of him to accuse China of anything because China has been more victim than perpetrator in the so-called free trade. China did not call the shots in the beginning, not then, not now. It was not China which invested in those sweatshops. It was not the Chinese government that forces a trade deficit with American businesses – it was rather the other way around. It was American capitalists who moved businesses to China, creating those sweatshops and fattening up in the process – keeping most of the profits. To the capitalists, the sweatshops and the trade deficits are not moral or immoral, they are just good business. Pity Mr. Cafferty could not see this and have empathy with Chinese workers who, like Mr. Cafferty himself in a way, are just workers who own nothing but a good day's labor. Given a choice, the Chinese workers would leave those sweatshops this very minute, much in the same way Mr. Cafferty would move to a better job if there was one on offer.

Mr. Cafferty's remarks just show how ignorant the Jack Caffertys of America are. China has for the past thirty years allowed itself to be the global workshop and allowed its people to toil under harsh conditions so that Mr. Cafferty and other Americans can have a cheaper shirt to wear to the office. China has bought American Treasury bonds to keep the United States going. And now this. "Goons and thugs" are what China gets from the Jack Caffertys in the mainstream media. You wonder what else China should do to please Mr. Cafferty. Give the billions of dollars of trade surplus back to America for free?

I'm not suggesting they would or that they could, but perhaps you know, that Chinese government should close all sweatshops and stop buying US Treasury bonds just to teach the Jack Caffertys a lesson and get them to understand how lucky they are thanks to the very existence of those "goons and thugs" they so despise.

It's not worth it to be angry over remarks by Americans who should have known better. Americans, as Chinese to be sure, can be very ignorant. One time back in 1989, in Honolulu as a matter of fact, I was talking to a proud middle-aged American man during the break of a seminar when he, totally out of the blue, asked me: "Do you have electricity in China?"

Stunned and lacking in tact, I replied: "No, we don't. But we do have nuclear weapons."

"Up to our eyeballs" from Mr. Cafferty, by the way means nothing more than "very much". Variously "up to the ear", "up to the neck" and "up to here" (pointing to one's throat), "up to our eyeballs" functions as an adverb and is used in situations one finds intolerable.

I find Mr. Cafferty very educating, aside from intolerable of course. Don't you think?

Even if Chinese bloggers are fed up to the throat with him.

Zhang Xin is Trainer at chinadaily.com.cn. He has been with China Daily since 1988, when he graduated from Beijing Foreign Studies University. Write him at: zhangxin@chinadaily.com.cn, or raise a question for potential use in a future column.