It is not often that you wake up to find yourself infamous. With great excitement, a Chinese friend called yesterday to tell me that I had become an overnight sensation. It would seem that I am, in my persona as a Times correspondent, the most hated person in China today.

It took but a moment to track down on the popular news website www.sina.com that The Times topped the list of the news in China most commented on. The pages of comments already totalled 105. The comments themselves exceeded 11,335 – high even by the standards of a country where the internet is the top forum for discussion – and the number is rising steadily.

I was able to watch, live, as new comments popped up all day under a headline about how the West was distorting China’s Olympics. The barrage should hardly have come as a surprise.

My office telephone has been ringing with calls from enraged Chinese after the Foreign Ministry spokesman on Tuesday said that a Times commentary by Simon Barnes, comparing the Beijing Olympics to Nazi Germany’s 1936 Games, was “an insult to the Chinese and world people”.

One caller threatened death to Michael Portillo, author of a similar piece in The Sunday Times. Others reserved that fate for me. It is easy for someone in China to assume that I wrote these pieces: the Times website is blocked most of the time, making it hard to find out just how this newspaper has covered the unrest in Tibet.

What has followed appears to be an outburst of popular anger. The Foreign Ministry and many papers and websites may have fuelled the fire with daily attacks on a perceived bias in Western coverage of Tibet. But this does not look like an orchestrated hate campaign against The Times.

China may have a prima facie case. Some photograph captions in Western media appear to have been sloppy. But China-watchers wonder whether the attacks on the media reveal the instinct of a single-party state to blame the messenger whether the message is accurate or not.

The stream of invective reflects a deeply felt nationalist pride that now has the Olympics at its core. The Games are for most Chinese a moment when they want to celebrate, with the world, their achievements, development and prosperity of the past three decades.

In casual conversation, many Chinese tell me they believe that the Games will demonstrate that their country has finally emerged from its humiliation at the hands of Western powers during the 19th century. Several comments take up the nationalist theme by reminding Britain of the damage it inflicted on China with the Opium Wars of the 19th century, which forced treaty ports open for trade. Many comments voice fury at the burning by Britain and France of the Yuan Ming Yuan, the summer palace of the Qing dynasty emperors. (They do not mention that this action was partly in retaliation for the murders of members of an international diplomatic delegation, including a Times correspondent.)

The voices want the West to understand that theirs is not a country struggling under a weak emperor or riven by the Cultural Revolution but one keen to show the achievements of one of the oldest civilisations on Earth.

Other commentators have been less thoughtful: “Ban all journalists of The Times of England from reporting in China”; “Be aware, there will be a settling of accounts”; “The Times is just a smaller and smaller newspaper”; or simply, “Abominable”.

This paper is far from being the only Western media organisation to be accused of an antiChinese bias since the Tibetan unrest. CNN has come in for particular opprobrium. A university student has set up a website, www.anti-cnn.com, devoted to showcasing misleading or incorrect use of photographs. The Times is featured too. A new phrase, “Don’t be too CNN”, has entered the Chinese vocabulary, meaning: “Don’t ignore the truth.”

Yet, as I sipped a late-night cup of Oolong tea, I had no real feeling of being under threat. Several of those who telephoned just wanted to let off steam, making the point that they had expected China to get a fairer press in the West and demanding that the reporter write without bias or prejudice. It is a reasonable point.

Family history

In 1793 a relative of Jane Macartney’s caused such an uproar in China that the entire British Embassy was sent home. Lord George Macartney became the first foreign envoy to meet the Emperor without performing the kow tow, in which subjects must touch the ground with their forehead nine times. He was sent packing

Times Recommends

• Tehran cannot live up to its rhetoric
• The new unicycle that will ‘change the world’
• We cannot wish away Iran’s bomb