Western media's callous delight at China's stock market crash is totally uncalled for

If you were greatly annoyed or disappointed by the largely cold and unsympathetic Western media commentary about China's stock market plunge, this didn't mean you had to be a member of the State Council or an uncritical panda-hugger. All you'd have to have been was a fair-minded person.

Even quality Western newspapers were dispensing dismissive decrees with unseemly glee. Press punsters could not resist the cheap headline ("The great fall of China"). Instant-analysis types were practically dancing in the pubs watching the "prestige of the party" allegedly shrink along with the Shanghai and Shenzhen composites. Even respected press portals were positively entertained by "the government's frenzied attempts", "dodgy intervention" and "helplessness".

Let us leave aside for the moment whether we Western journalists are capable, in the face of a rough patch for China and its people, of summoning our empathy. The other question is whether Western journalists were being journalistic: it was as if the media had never before seen a stock market bubble burst, or ever witnessed a scary gigantic sell-off.

It was as if something this messy could only have occurred on the watch of a primitive Communist government failing to fit into the fancy pants of sophisticated Western free-marketers.

Waves of low-grade ideological journalism kept coming at you. Beijing's counter-measures were "desperate", and only the country's "compliant press" would find them credible, as the authorities were "in danger of losing credibility" and China's market began to look "more like the Wild West". And of course there was near unanimity on this core point: "the collapse in confidence … is a sharp indictment of the party's prestige", "a grave economic blemish on Xi Jinping and Li Keqiang , China's leaders".

Precious few helpful or positive suggestions were offered - why care about 1.4 billion people assembled in the world's most populous country, which happens also to include a most glamorous and fascinating special administrative region? Let them melt on their margins! Even well-meaning recommendations reeked of an absolutely extraordinary deficit of self-awareness. "The [Chinese] government should … be trying to strengthen the foundations of its economy and financial system," scolded a famous US newspaper, as if such measures were appropriate solely for China.

"It could do so by better regulating and policing its securities market to root out fraud and speculation." Hmm … can we think of any other major economy that has suffered through similar traumas for which such a remedy would be appropriate?