Inflamed? Benign?

When reporters throw around modifiers, you got a choice of whom to believe. The Boston Sunday Globe, Dec 4, 2016, published stories on facing pages about Trump’s stirring up the diplomats in Foggy Bottom by talking to the Mexican president and then to the president of Taiwan. The first story, by the Washington Post, says it’s one thing to make “wild claims” domestically, but “it’s another to inflame a fellow world power with a careless word or two. Today, a fellow world power — China — is inflamed.”

The story on the facing page is by the New York Times. It says: “Indeed, China’s first initial reaction, from Foreign Minister Wang Yi, was fairly benign — though it was firm in reiterating the One China policy, under which the United States formally recognized Beijing as China’s sole government in 1978 and broke ties with Taiwan a year later.”

Is the Chinese reaction Inflamed or benign? Maybe this one goes to the New York Times, since the story quotes an expert, and for a change he is not anonymous. He is an associate professor at the School of International Studies at Peking University. His name — and I doubt that the Times is making this up — is Wang Dong.