Caring about China can be hard to do. Many Chinese, for starters, resent it when others express concern, viewing it as an intrusion, especially when the other party disagrees with something China has done.

Recently I wrote about the China versus Google fight. The article leaned in favor of supporting Google's decision not to accept Chinese hacking into its customers' e-mail accounts, but it hardly nominated the Google people for the Nobel Peace Prize. Even so, soon after this column, syndicated in such major world papers as The Japan Times and the Korean Times, I was told my e-mail account had been hacked. The hacking, said Google Gmail security, originated with some computers or computer networks on the mainland of China.

One can only speculate as to the cause of the hack. But it must have had something to do with the column asking China's leadership to exercise a bit more tender care when it tries to roll over people, whether they be protesters, dissidents or American corporations.