Monday

INSIDE the Bella Centre, the second week of talks feels subtly different from the first. Outside, it is very different indeed. In both cases, the difference is more people. Inside, that just means crowding; outside it means long queues of people failing to get in.

The queues outside have become the staple war-stories and there-but-for-the-grace-of-God ruminations of the people inside. Those affected have been mostly, but not entirely, those who registered for the conference in advance, but who didn’t actually arrive and try to pick up their accreditation until Monday. It is unclear to this correspondent whether the accreditation system actually broke or just slowed down, but the queue for accreditation stretched for hundreds of metres and most of the day. A former colleague of mine spent seven hours out in the cold and two more waiting inside the building before getting to the conference. It undoubtedly gave her complexion a becoming rosy glow, but cosmetics would have been easier.
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The root cause is that about three times more people are registered than could ever get in at one time. While this is unfortunate, to some extent it may also be an unavoidable correlate of a commitment to transparency—people should be able to get in, and everyone knows that not all of those registered for anything larger than a dinner party can be expected to turn up at the beginning and stay until the end. There is no denying, though, that the superfluity could have been better handled, and that the poor freezing wretches immobilised outside deserved better.

Inside, temperature and stasis are not a problem; things are simply slower. This is in part because more of the 15,000 people in the building now know each other than did so last week; they have what physicists would call an increased cross-section of interaction. Though such interactions may speed the transmission of information through the halls by way of leak, chat and argument, they slow down physical movement. If you’re not greeting one of your friends, you’re bumping into someone who has stopped to greet one of hers.

There were also, thanks to one of the NGOs, some ents in the building today—or at least walking trees, which comes to the same thing. They were decorative and amusing, but would have had a slow coming of it from Birnam Wood to Dunsinane.

The main obstacle, though, is simply more bodies. Ministerial delegations, and some heads of government, have turned up for the high-level part of the meeting, kicked off with some rather insipid music and a speech by Prince Charles on Tuesday afternoon, and they have their own entourages. At the highest level this can sometimes be useful—coming back to the press room from seeing someone in the furthest reaches of the NGO hall turned out to be remarkably quick when slipstreaming behind the president of the Maldives and his people as they made their way across in double-time. In general, though, people impede each other, and more people (over 100 heads of government by Friday) means more impediments.

The organisers are aware of the issues. Their first step at control has been to limit the number of people NGOs can bring in with a limited issue of extra cards. An NGOnista wanting to get in now needs her photo-ID accreditation and one of these extra cards, and since supply of the extra cards is designed to fall far below demand, there should be fewer people in the building. If this is working at all, though, the build up of delegates and media feels as if it is more than making up for the reductions.

And soon things could get more crowded still. Ominous new metal detectors and X-ray machines have turned up at the doors of the media centre. They are not yet operational, but they foreshadow a future in which access to the halls where delegates are meeting, and the atria surrounding and connecting those halls, is curtailed, and non-delegates are penned up more tightly. It is hard to object to this; giving the delegates room to get on with the negotiations is rather the point of us all being here in the first place. But it's hard not to feel that even in this vast building, stir-craziness beckons.

Wednesday

WEDNESDAY saw various arrivals at the Copenhagen conference: some heads of state, some settling snow and a rising sense of despair. The conference was designed to ratchet up the pressure as it moved form the procedural to the substantive, and from functionaries to heads of state. Now the bigwigs are here making statements, and the procedural side of things is pretty much a mess.

It would probably be overstating things to say the negotiations are actually going backwards, but not by much. By Wednesday evening the simpler, but to some extent less important, of the two texts under discussion, which concerns the Kyoto protocol, had evolved to a draft that was accepted at a plenary. That doesn’t mean that negotiations are reaching a conclusion—there are still large amounts of text in brackets. But there is something for ministers to discuss. Or rather there would be, except that after the text was adopted a new procedural disagreement arose over exactly how it should be discussed.

The other text, that on long-term commitment, was not even that far advanced, having yet to make it to a plenary for acceptance. It has, though, managed to grow larger as it waits. Passages have doubled in length, with mutually exclusive courses of action piling up on top of each other while still maintaining their bracketed-off isolation. At lunchtime on Wednesday the ill-defined prospect of new language, possibly simplifying language of some kind, from the Danish presidency had led to a new spate of procedural problems that slowed things further.

All in all, the idea that presidents and prime ministers turning up would spur a breakthrough seems wrong. It was meant to goad the parties into producing ship-shape documents in which the big things that remained to be done were well defined. Then the big cheeses would reach agreement on the key issues—emissions, financing, the nature of developing-country commitments inflatable water games  and the means by which they might be audited—and bless the resulting texts, producing not treaties but documents in which there was serious political capital invested. Part of that political agreement would be a timetable for developing the outcomes into new legal documents for signing at some point in 2010.

That, in itself, was an impressively ambitious target given where things stood at the beginning of the conference. With little more than a day before the final push, it looks a good bit worse.

Tim Groser, New Zealand’s minister for trade, and in a previous life as a diplomat a veteran of WTO negotiations, is scathing on the subject. “What’s happening here is a test of the great old political theorem ‘Bring all these ministers together and the risk and fear of failure is so high that that will force a result’. Now we’ve never tested this at the highest levels of government before in my experience, but in the trade arena we have tested it to destruction. This was the theory behind Seattle. Complete failure. This was the theory about Cancun in 2003. Complete failure. The theory was don’t negotiate in Geneva—arrive here and let political heads be cracked. In my experience that’s a great theory that doesn’t work in practice.

“Now ... the stakes here are that much higher. But right now, can I see a basis in the two texts for an outcome? No.”

Britain’s Secretary of State for Energy and Climate Change, Ed Miliband, was less openly despairing, but also less upbeat than he usually is—perhaps because he was speaking to reporters when a meeting he was meant to be party to had been delayed by 20 hours. “The real danger is that when leaders are here there aren’t just a few freshwater pearl pendant  outstanding issues but a whole slew of oustanding issues and an enormous number of process issues. And if that is the situation we’ll find it very difficult to get an agreement.”

“I think it will be a tragedy if we failed because we couldn’t agree on substance. I think it would be a farce if we failed to reach agreement because of the process.”

Mr Miliband continues to stress that he thinks the impasse can still be solved, but he has not explained how. And it is part of the point of the highest-level-pressure approach that it should impose ever more pressure as time goes by, leading to a sense of breakthrough at the end. But that end is drawing nigh, and out in the snow beyond the windows the twin horsemen of tragedy and farce loom ever larger.

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Friday

ONE of the bonuses of a week spent in Copenhagen’s Bella Centre is an introduction to Danish history. Every meeting room is named for a great Dane of the past, from the internationally renowned—Hans Christian Andersen, Karen Blixen, Tycho Brahe, Victor Borge—to those with more specialist appeal, such as Saxo Grammaticus, a mediaeval historian; Asger Jorn, an artist and founding member of the Situationist International; and Liva Weel, an actress.

If there is one Dane who feels like the patron saint of the later stages of this meeting, though, it is Niels Bohr, a great physicist, whose room sits between those of Bodil Udsen, another actress, and Halfdan Rasmussen, a poet. One of Bohr’s great contributions to the quantum theory he did much to found was the Copenhagen Interpretation, a piece of necessary doublethink which seems spectacularly apposite in these closing stages of the conference.

The Copenhagen Interpretation is a way of making sense of the fact that quantum physics describes things in terms of “wave functions”, which can develop in many different directions at once, allowing various mutually exclusive states of the world to be “superimposed” on each other. The world as it is observed, on the other hand, offers only one verifiable version of reality at a time. The Copenhagen Interpretation reconciles the two points of view by saying that it is the act of observing a system which moves it from the weird multiplicities inherent in the mathematics of quantum theory to an everyday state of is or is not. The universe behaves in its weird and wavy way until you try to catch it doing so—then it pretends it was solid and dependable all along.

The most famous mascot—and victim—of the Copenhagen Interpretation is Schrodinger’s cat, which is imagined to be locked in a box with a vial of poison gas. The vial will be silver pearl jewelry broken if a certain atom undergoes a radioactive decay. This process of decay is the sort of thing that quantum mechanics describes in terms of wave functions. Dead cats are the sort of thing normally described in simple positive terms. If you could see what was going on, at any given moment the decay would or would not have happened, the cat would or would not be dead. But in the parable of Schrodinger’s cat, the cat is locked in a box and cannot be observed, and according to the Copenhagen Interpretation the mathematics of the quantum world start to apply not just to the atom, but also to the cat that depends on it. Its living and dead states become superimposed on each other, making it neither one nor the other. Its fate is decided only when someone opens the box and looks inside.

Something eerily similar seems to be going on here. Statements are being made in the plenary hall by heads of government, but these do not seem to be the negotiations in any usual sense. Those go on offstage, backstage, as sealed away from public view as Schrodinger’s cat. The different bracketed possibilities in the various texts exist on top of each other, untested, unmeasured. But the time to open the box must surely approach. The final deal must, at some point, be a genuine thing, something measured and understood—a live cat or a dead one. The indeterminism cannot last forever.

At least so Niels Bohr would have said. Here in the conference hall the comforting certainties of something like quantum physics seem far off. The cat may not appear, and spokespeople may simply assure us as to its health or lack there of. Or it may appear and look dead to some eyes, live to others.

The experiment continues.

EYEWITNESSES on the Northwest Airlines flight 253 between Amsterdam and Detroit on Christmas day spoke of a loud bang, a struggle and smoke and screams shortly before the plane touched down at its destination. It emerged that the chaotic scenes were of flight attendants and fellow passengers tackling a man apparently attempting to detonate a device concealed on his body. That he was unsuccessful in his apparent attempt to down the airliner is both a testament to the quick reactions of those travelling with him and the seemingly experimental nature of the device he was trying to let off.

The seriousness of this new threat to airline safety is clear. “This was the real deal,” said Peter King, a senior Republican on the House Homeland Security Committee. The White House declared the incident an “attempted act of terrorism”. The details of the failed attack are still unclear but some facts have emerged. The man who carried out the attack on a plane carrying 289 people is named as Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, a young Nigerian man who boarded a flight in Lagos and transferred to the Northwest jet in Amsterdam. He is believed to have spent several of the past few years studying at a university in London.
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His background may not yet be entirely clear but his motivation for attacking the airliner, he is said to have claimed, is that he was directed by al-Qaeda. Already police forces on both sides of the Atlantic have begun extensive operations to ascertain whether he was acting alone under the inspiration of the fundamentalist terror group or whether he is part of a wider conspiracy. Part of the answer to that question may come from analysis of the explosives he used, which Mr Abdulmutallab says he obtained in Yemen.

According to American government sources the device was more of an incendiary than a regular bomb. What is clear is this is a new kind of weapon in the battle to bring down passenger-laden planes. Mr Abdulmutallab apparently tried to ignite an explosive powder taped to his leg by introducing the contents of a syringe. Though he has been left badly burned, it seems clear that the desired effect of bringing down the plane was avoided either by a malfunction or because inflatable slides of the intervention of passengers and crew. The sophistication of the device may give a clue as to whether he was acting alone or had wider backing from people connected to al-Qaeda.

Worryingly the circumstances recall a plot in 2006 to use liquid bombs, smuggled on board transatlantic flights, to down several aircraft by a group of young British men with links to al-Qaeda. It bears more of a resemblance to the attempt in 2001 by Richard Reid to down an American Airlines flight from Paris to Miami with a bomb hidden in his shoe. Investigation will centre on whether this is the latest attempt by al-Qaeda to develop a device that is hard to detect but still capable of bringing down an airliner.

Airport security will also come under close scrutiny again. Mr Abdulmutallab boarded his flight in Lagos’s international airport, which has frequently come under criticism for its lax security. Though the airport has recently been cultured pearl jewelry deemed to meet international standards perhaps the stringent security in Europe or America would have detected the paraphernalia carried by Mr Abdulmutallab. Of more concern is that the suspect's name was in an international database indicating "a significant terrorist connection" according to Mr King. Although he did not appear on a "no-fly" list it is troubling that he boarded his flights without greater security checks. Since the incident both American and European airports have stepped up security measures.

Another concern is the connection with Britain and Nigeria. Britain has a record of turning out radicalised young Muslims intent on carnage though it is trying to tackle this problem. But terrorism-watchers are growing increasingly worried that al-Qaeda and other Islamist terrorist groups from across north Africa have attached themselves to Nigeria’s Islamic sects, which feed turquoise jewelry off ever-mounting resentment of its wretched government. Either way, al-Qaeda’s long reach has made itself apparent once again.

Is Europe a nicer place to live and work than America? That is not the proposal we were supposed to be debating. But since leisure time and income are so intrinsic to ideas of the good life, our debate has sometimes veered off in that direction. Americans enjoy higher incomes per person than Europeans largely because they spend more time at work. America has (in good times, at least) more people employed, working longer hours and with fewer holidays. Europe trades off extra spending power for more leisure time, much of it in the form of long holidays. At issue is whether Europe makes the right choice.

It does not, argues Professor Gordon. In his closing statement he takes issue with his opponent's utopian view of Europe. It's not all culture and  inflatable slides cathedrals, he says. Much of Western Europe is an unpleasant and cramped place to live in. If Europe is so nice, he asks, why are Europeans so much less happy than Americans, according to surveys? That comparison allows him to return to one of his earlier themes. He finds no statistical link across countries between holiday time, on the one hand, and health and happiness, on the other.

It is facile, says Professor Gordon, to ask whether Americans would prefer fewer holidays without balancing the benefits of more time off against the costs in lost spending power. What matters, he says, is finding the right balance between income and leisure time. In his judgment, Europeans would be better off working more and holidaying less. Raising hours worked in Europe by a third would increase after-tax incomes by a half, he reckons. The payoff is so favourable because the extra work hours would essentially be tax-free: the cost freshwater pearl earrings of government would be spread over more hours of work. In his final broadside, he says Europe's preference for fewer working hours is largely based on the lump of labour fallacy, "the mistaken belief that forcing people to work less creates new jobs for others".

Mr de Graaf, his opponent, uses the final statement to bolster his main argument that long holidays are essential to health and happiness. Snacking on holidays, as Americans are wont to do, is not enough to stay well. "Blocks of time, not just a day here or there, are needed for optimal health," says Mr de Graaf. Doctors have long been aware of a link between poor health and the pressures of work, he argues. Stress makes people unwell, and taking too few holidays makes people stressful.

If poor diet explains why Americans are less healthy than Europeans, we must not ignore the reasons why they eat so badly. It is partly because Americans do not have enough time to eat well, he says. Unhealthy fast foods are the resort of a population that spends too much akoya pearl ring time at work and too little time at leisure.

America's preference for higher income and consumption over leisure time also has an environmental cost, says Mr de Graaf. GDP is not the be-all and end-all of economic life. For countries that are already rich, an increase in GDP does not add much to the quality of life, especially if it requires seemingly endless striving and environmental destruction. Mr de Graaf ends with an exhortation and a witty nod to Marx and Engels: "Workers of the world, relax!"

THE best dishes of the year? We’ll get to the roasted unicorn in dwarf-fairy reduction sauce soon enough. But perspective is everything. For much of 2009 I was not the restaurant critic of The New York Times. I was the newspaper’s culture editor, with little access to the sort of food that ordinarily appears in articles like this one.

Many of my meals were taken at my desk, between phone calls or sometimes during them, sometimes three times a day. Others were taken on weekends, the children in tow, rushing from beach to grocery store to birthday party or back. Still more were eaten at the bars of Times Square gin mills well after the newspaper’s nightly deadlines, as colleagues railed into the dark against the perfidy of whoever had stood in the way of our getting to the place earlier.

Of course, I did not go hungry before stepping into the big broughams of Frank Bruni, my brilliant and tireless predecessor, who left his post at the end of August. As a civilian with a deep interest in the city’s restaurant culture, I was able to sneak in some truly memorable dishes this year: among them, a perfect agnolotti del plin at Del Posto; a tiny piece of French toast at Momofuku Ko; a crisp and juicy truffle-stuffed chicken thigh with Medjool dates, carrot mousseline and tatsoi at Per Se.

As an amateur, I would also rate the suckling-pig tacos that Jimmy Bradley served as a Monday night special at the Red Cat in Chelsea as among the best things I ate in 2009. I also loved the spicy chicken shwarma served at the new, expanded Pick-a-Pita on Eighth Avenue near the newsroom, and the Korean tacos from the Kogi truck in Los Angeles.

But the following list, presented in no particular order, reflects my recent experience as a professional eater. It is the accounting of a fellow feeding with critical intent, who has read back over some months of notes to determine what, of all the new dishes in all the new restaurants in New York City, really were his favorites. (Since The Times does not review new restaurants until a decent interval has passed, the list includes a few dishes from places that opened at the end of 2008.)

In such cases where it seemed appropriate, I reached out to the creators and asked for a recipe. Even made by an amateur with a grim kitchen in Somewheresville, they can approximate the quality experienced here in the big town, under sparkling lights.

THE SMOKED HADDOCK TART AT LE CAPRICE It is early days yet over at Le Caprice, the new American outpost of London’s club-like Piccadilly snob-shop, but Michael Hartnell, the chef, has at least one good card to play: this marvelous appetizer. With smoked haddock still a relative rarity in the United States, its smoky sweetness is a small taste of British sophistication, especially against the melting gold of the two tiny poached quail eggs he places above the pastry. Eaten at the bar, after the application of a Hendrick’s martini, this dish can leave even the rubiest of American rubes feeling Bondlike and well fed. In the Pierre Hotel, 795 Fifth Avenue (61st Street), Upper East Side, (212) 940-8195.

THE FUSILLI WITH RED-WINE BRAISED OCTOPUS AND BONE MARROW AT MAREA This is surf and turf from Crazytown, Italy, near the American border. Michael White, the hugely talented pasta maven behind Chris Cannon’s excellent new restaurant in the space that used to be San Domenico, cooks a mirepoix in a heavy pot, then adds baby octopus, Sangiovese and tomato purée. This simmers away for an hour, until the little fellows are fork tender and the sauce gone almost thick with flavor. The result is introduced to a serious amount of seared bone marrow and some twirls of house-made fusilli. The marrow emulsifies and acts as butter does in a sauce — if butter were 10 times richer than it already is. The combination is a loving marriage between separate species. 240 Central Park South (Broadway), Columbus Circle, (212) 582-5100.

THE POMMES ALIGOT AT MINETTA TAVERN A side dish, particularly well suited to the restaurant’s excellent roast chicken, the pommes aligot at Keith McNally’s glittery remake of this Greenwich Village landmark are a marvel of silky excellence. (They more than make up for the restaurant’s one notable misstep: a partly open kitchen that clashes with both the aesthetic inflatable slides  of the room and the heretofore modest demeanor of the men who run it, Riad Nasr and Lee Hanson.) Yukon Gold potatoes are whipped smooth with garlic, enormous amounts of butter and cheddar curds until they begin to turn to ribbons — a potato dish that is literally elastic. It tastes of Alpine clouds. 113 Macdougal Street (Minetta Lane), Greenwich Village, (212) 475-3850.

THE DUCK MEATLOAF AT BUTTERMILK CHANNEL Buttermilk Channel roared onto the Brooklyn dining scene late last year with family-friendly service, an excellent wine list and a great deal of comforting food. Popovers and fried chicken don’t make year-end roundups, though. Rich, raisin-studded, thyme-infused duck meatloaf does. Doug Crowell, the restaurant’s owner, is pairing the meat with puréed parsnips zipped on orange and star anise. You could do that at home, too, or try it alongside the pommes aligot. 524 Court Street (Huntington Street), Carroll Gardens, Brooklyn, (718) 852-8490.

THE BOUDIN BASQUE AT DBGB KITCHEN AND BAR This disk of spicy blood sausage with bits of head meat for textural contrast is served above a small pool of scallion-brightened, cream-thickened mashed potatoes. It is the standout sausage among many at Daniel Boulud’s audacious new restaurant on the lower Bowery, just a few steps down from jewelry boxes the birthplace of punk rock. Through a spokeswoman, Georgette Farkas, Mr. Boulud declined to offer a recipe for the home cook. It’s too easy for it all to go terribly wrong, Ms. Farkas said. Not at the restaurant, though! 299 Bowery (Houston Street), East Village, (212) 933-5300.

THE MEATBALL PIZZA AT CO. Jim Lahey’s much debated Chelsea pizzeria is devoted almost to a fault to the excellence of its dough, as Frank Bruni sagely pointed out in his one-star review of the restaurant in the spring. But in recent months, Mr. Lahey’s been dialing in his toppings and the use of his insanely hot oven; he’s now putting out pies that are good enough to do justice to his dough and to rival the city’s best pizzas. The veal meatball version, with buffalo mozzarella, tomato, caramelized onions, gaeta olives, aged pecorino and oregano, is my favorite. 230 Ninth Avenue (24th Street), Chelsea, (212) 243-1105.

THE PRIME MANHATTAN AT PRIME MEATS There are a lot of people here who appear to have dressed for a Vancouver trapping expedition, attended a gallery show in Bushwick, and then had the idea to mush over to Carroll Gardens for absinthe. But this restaurant from the brilliant team behind the Frankies empire, while not even yet completely open, has wonderful food and a truly inspired drinks menu arranged by Damon Boelte. His Manhattan, built out of 100-proof Rittenhouse rye, Dolin sweet vermouth and bitters made at the restaurant out of buddha’s hand, a lemony citrus fruit, is a glass of refinement afforded only artists and dreamers: a direct portal into an imaginary 19th-century New York City. 465 Court Street (Luquer Street), Carroll Gardens, Brooklyn, (718) 254-0327.

THE OYSTER PAN ROAST AT THE JOHN DORY Here’s a wild card. This restaurant opened in December 2008, and closed in August. But April Bloomfield, the chef and an owner, and Ken Friedman, another owner, now have The Breslin to their name, and are making noises about reopening the John Dory in another space. So there’s some chance we’ll see this marvelous dish — a murderously rich pan roast topped with toast slathered in uni butter — again. Here’s hoping: it made my winter last year. This year, you can cook it at home.

THE FRIED CURRIED PINK SNAPPER AT OCEANA Served upright, as if it had been caught swimming through hot oil and flash-fried into statuary, this amazing dish is among the most flavorful you can get at the new and massive version of stately old Oceana, now in the McGraw-Hill Building on West 49th Street. Served with lotus coins and strips of cucumber, with cilantro strewn here and there above its fantastic Indian-inflected sauce, it is a superb meal for two, accompanied by some spicy Napa cabbage. 1221 Avenue of the Americas (entrance on 49th Street), Midtown, (212) 759-5941.

THE CLASSIC BANH MI AT BAOGUETTE You can take subways, buses and trains to akoya pearl ring  taste and debate the best banh mi in town. For the best I had in a new restaurant, though, look no farther than lower Lexington Avenue, where Michael Huynh opened Baoguette last December. His classic version, with house-made pâté, terrine and pork belly on a baguette from Tom Cat Bakery, with pickled daikon, cilantro and jalapeño, dabbed with their own mayo and squirted with fish sauce and Sriracha, is delicious and, at $5, among the best quality-to-cost ratios available in the city. 61 Lexington Avenue (between 25th and 26th Streets), Murray Hill, (212) 532-1133

THE MAPLE BUDINO AT LOCANDA VERDE Karen DeMasco is the wildly gifted pastry chef at Locanda Verde, which the chef Andrew Carmellini opened in the Greenwich Hotel in TriBeCa with a team of partners in the late spring. She brought a beautiful simplicity to the dessert menu at Tom Colicchio’s Craft, where her impact was big enough that, more than a year after she left, she is still prominently featured on that restaurant’s Web site. At Locanda Verde, she brings deep flavor and mischievous intensity to a dessert menu that sees its heights in a dark maple budino with candied pecans and cranberry sorbetto. Make it at home and serve it to friends exactly as if you were serving overstrong cocktails or recreational drugs. Taxonomically speaking, they are all of a piece. The Greenwich Hotel, 377 Greenwich Street (North Moore Street), TriBeCa, (212) 925-3797.

THE execution in Xinjiang of a Pakistan-born British drugs mule, Akmal Shaikh, on December 29th is the first of a European citizen in China in over half a century. Prime Minister Gordon Brown condemned the execution in the strongest terms, echoed by the British media. The Chinese government responded by ordering Mr Brown and his government to "correct their mistakes" if Sino-British relations were not to be harmed. But relations were already strained as  inflatable bouncer  British criticism of China's stymying of a potentially bolder deal at Copenhagen has come out into the open. Much of the good work done over the past few years by China's sharp and elegant ambassador, Fu Ying, to bolster Chinese soft power in Britain threatens to come unravelled. (Though she may draw comfort from the Daily Mail's readers: reacting against the newspaper's line, they seem to agree that the only good heroin dealer is a dead one.)

China of course always bristles at outside interference, which this time included calls for leniency for Mr Shaikh. Many Chinese are furious that nearly all British moralising about the case is being made with blithe forgetfulness about Britain's Opium Wars, a humiliation still drummed into every Chinese schoolchild. For other Chinese, Mr Shaikh's British citizenship may not have been as salient as his Muslim background and his jewelry boxes  superficial resemblance to those damn pesky Uighurs in Xinjiang.

But the debates swirling around the internet about these issues belie the main point. China has just killed a man about whose mental health big questions remain. His family insist he was duped by drug dealers who played on delusions of making it big in China as a pop star. In court, the judges presiding over his case laughed out loud over Mr Shaikh's incoherent defence. Yet at no point during the judicial process was an independent psychiatric evaluation allowed of Mr Shaikh's mental state. So, for all prickliness over foreign "interference", the central issue is whether or not Mr Shaikh was afforded procedural protections supposedly guaranteed by the state. That, in turn, raises questions about how much Chinese defendants enjoy those same supposed protections. Despite recent reforms (all capital cases must go up to the Supreme Court), details about capital punishment are as murky as any part of China's judicial system.

Take the case of Mr Shaikh and add it to China's strong-arm dealings at Copenhagen; its insistence on maintaining a cheap currency; its harsh demand that 18 Uighurs twisted pearl necklace  seeking political asylum in Cambodia be returned; and its fierce sentencing of the brave reformist Liu Xiaobo last week: then a broader question pushes forward. Is China now butting up against the limits of the charm offensive which more than anything has defined its diplomacy and soft power for the past decade?