Editor’s note for Monday, March 29, 2021

My thoughts today:

If you’re in New York and speak Chinese, interpreters are badly needed at vaccine sites.

“Boy, your greatest achievement is to have ruined the friendly relations between China and Canada, and have turned Canada into a running dog of the U.S.,” tweeted Lǐ Yáng 李杨, China’s consul-general to Rio de Janeiro, along with a photo of Canadian prime minister Trudeau.

It’s not clear what the proximate cause of the tweet was: there are too many ways that Ottowa has recently offended Beijing, but as Canada’s Globe and Mail says, the use of the slur “‘running dog’…by a Chinese diplomat against a foreign leader is unusual, even by Beijing’s standards.”

Running dog is our word of the day. As Global Times staff writer Qingqing Chen helpfully explains, “It is literal translation of the Chinese pejorative 走狗 (zǒu gǒu), meaning a yes-man or lackey, referring to allies of counterrevolutionary imperial forces in history.”

—Jeremy Goldkorn, Editor-in-Chief