Presumably as an expression of his own freedom of expression, His Excellency the Chinese Ambassador to Norway was given space in The Times to react to the award of the Nobel Prize for Peace to Liu Xiaobo "for his long and non-violent struggle for fundamental human rights in China".

It appears that His Excellency is a fan of Orwell’s and seems to have taken the fundamental tenets of “1984” well on board.

According to His Excellency, Mr Xiaobo is a convicted criminal and as such the award to him of one of the most prestigious prizes in the world is simply a political gambit aimed at harming the interests of China.

Let us examine the crime, heinous as it is, that Mr Xiaobo committed.

The Ambassador tells us that he was found guilty under Art 105 of the Chinese Criminal Code.

A couple of seconds of research tells us that "Anyone who uses rumour, slander or other means to encourage subversion of the political power of the State or to overthrow the socialist system, shall be sentenced to fixed-term imprisonment of not more than five years. However, the ringleaders and anyone whose crime is monstrous shall be sentenced to fixed-term imprisonment of not less than five years.”

An organ of the United Nations is of the opinion that Article 105 is “yet another” example of a broad and imprecise definition liable to be both misapplied and misused. The article, you will see, defines the offence it covers as “organising, scheming and acting to subvert the political power of the State and overthrow the socialist system” and “incitement to subvert the political power of the State and overthrow the socialist system by means of spreading rumours, slander or other means”.

The critique goes on to tell us that the concept of “other means” is open to very broad interpretation, as if this wasn’t a statement of the bleedin’ obvious.

It goes on to tell us that under Article 105, even communication of thoughts and ideas or, for that matter, opinions, without intent to commit any violent or criminal act, may be regarded as subversion.

Ordinarily, anyone with a grasp of English that isn’t twisted by an over-riding need to justify the acts of a totalitarian state, an act of subversion requires more than mere communication of thoughts and ideas but, perhaps because of the aforementioned over-riding need, for the People’s Republic, this does not appear to be a material consideration.

The Ambassador goes on to write that the West so adores its own political system, it would love to have it globalised.

He then asks why such a “politically correct” system is at the moment also meeting so much economic and social difficulty? His Excellency seems to confound political systems with economic ones, much as, one recalls, Dr Karm Mifsud Bonnici, Mintoff’s worthy successor (“worth”, that is to say, because he carried on with his ways and means) confounded the life-blood of a nation ruled by the law (democracy) and the need to create jobs, opining that it was OK to suspend the first if creating the second required it.

The Ambassador asks “why for decades the west has been promoting its system in other parts of the world but has yet to produce convincing results?” I, for one, am convinced that democracy has produced results – results that demonstrate freedom of thought and expression, respect for the individual and general tolerance.

If the Ambassador doubts this, he should consider what would have happened had the Norwegian Ambassador to China tried to pen an article on the lines that his Chinese colleague did and tried to get it published all over China. “Yeah, right” would have been the thinly-described raspberry directed towards him.

I will end with a couple of paragraphs lifted directly from the Chinese Ambassador’s piece.

He wrote that “China has made headway in democratic policy making, in ensuring people’s right to know, to participate, to express, to supervise and in the rule of law. If one compares the China of two or three decades ago with today’s China, it is not too difficult to find that many of the issues we discussed then have long been addressed with the advancement of our reforms.”

He goes on to write that “in China, people enjoy freedom of expression, provided it is exercised within the limits of law. Undermining national security by abusing freedom of expression is an offence and will be punished by law.”

Am I the only one that has to restrain myself from rolling on the floor laughing at the insouciance with which His Excellency writes that “China has made headway in democratic policy” (as if they could go any further backwards) but then writes that “undermining national security ... will be punished by law” (as if this was an expression of some eternal truth)?

No wonder Malta was so friendly with China back in the glorious days of Mintoffian Socialism.