Yet things are more complex, not to say confused. Just when we think we have got Jiang’s number, as some exotic species of nature-worshipping romantic patriot with fascistic frills, we learn from interviews he has given that he is a democrat who has been jailed for his liberal beliefs. In one such interview, he invokes the lessons of Nazi ­history: China without democracy, he says, would be in danger of ­becoming like Germany in the 1930s.

A comforting view — were it not that in 1930s Germany there was a democracy of sorts, and it elected the Führer, not least because the Germans were persuaded that foreigners had done them down, and because of his racist attacks on Jews. And like Jiang, with his mystical descriptions of nature red in tooth and claw, the Nazis were big on life in the wild too.

A difficulty about criticising Jiang (and resurgent nationalism in general) is that there is truth in what he says about China being too enfeebled in the 19th-century to stand up to Europe’s buccaneering spirit. “No fightee, my coward John Chinaman” jeered Punch magazine in 1858 at a time when we were imposing the Treaty of Tianjin on a prostrate China. Jiang’s critique of his gutless countrymen reminds me of the 19th century Chinese commander obliged to explain yet ­another defeat to his emperor at the hands of the barbarians, who ­decided to take the high ground. Imagine China as an exquisite piece of porcelain, he wrote in a fancy memorial to the Throne. Now think of the foreign invaders as a rough stone…

But that was then. Although the Chinese indeed displayed herd-like instincts in totalitarian times, Mao and his legions of Party faithful, who slaughtered some 70 million of their flock, can hardly be ­described as lacking wolfish appetites. And having myself encountered plenty of heartfelt racial hostility during the Cultural Revolution, I recall how easily the sheep could turn wolfish when spurred on by chauvinist propaganda. Nor was China under Mao quiescent int­ernationally: the Korean War, fomenting revolution in Indonesia or Malaya, the border war with India, the near-war she provoked with Russia on the Ussuri river in 1969, or her later incursion into Vietnam are examples.