Bush will attend the opening ceremony of the Olympic Games, or so he announced this week. Merkel won’t come, because she simply doesn’t fancy the Olympic Games. Sarkozy is still considering it. At the G8 summit in Japan the coming week he will announce whether he will do the Chinese the favour of attending the Beijing Olympics. Well … favour?

According to China Daily he isn’t even welcome. In an online poll on the website Sina.com 88% of respondents stated that they regarded Sarkozy’s comments on China lately as ‘extremely unfriendly’. About the same percentage of the over 100,000 visitors to that website thought that it would be better if he just stayed away.