Cafferty attcked all the Chinese people who have trade relation with USA!

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关于Cafferty 讲话中的"China" 和"the Chinese" 英文确切含义, 加拿大英文语言专家Jim Bamber (bamber@perth.igs.net ) 仅从其英文角度作如下说明:

The problem is that he uses the words "China" and "the Chinese" which are vague and whose meaning depend to some extent on the context.

"I don't know if China is any different..." -- in this case "China" means the whole country, both government and people, as well as all other aspects of the country.  (这里, "China" 是整个国家, 包括政府和人民, 以及国家的各种方面.)

"...but our relationship which China is certainly different..." -- this implies more the government and trade partners, i.e. companies in China. (这里, "China" 广泛地暗指政府和贸易伙伴, 即中国的公司.)

"We're in hock to the Chinese up to our eyeballs..." -- again, this would mean the government and trade partners because the U.S. does not owe money to individual Chinese people. (这里, "the Chinese " 指政府和贸易伙伴, 而不是中国的个人, 因为美国与中国的个人没有钱财关系.)

"So I think our relationship with China has certainly changed..." -- government and trade partners, as above. (这里, "China" 广泛地暗指政府和贸易伙伴, 即中国的公司.)

"I think they're basically the same bunch of goons and thugs they've been for the last 50 years" -- this is the key statement, of course, and the question is who are "they".  My feeling is that it tends toward referring toward the government but there is a problem because most of his previous statements include trade partners as well.  Also, he does not distinguish between the Chinese government and the Chinese people (in this selection anyway) so he implies the consent of the Chinese people in the actions of the Chinese government and companies.  In any case, it is a statement which he would know was open to misinterpretation, whatever he meant by it, and he should have known to clarify it. (这里的关键是 "they", 不清楚是单指政府还是包括贸易伙伴, 或中国的人民. 应该表达清楚, 否则他暗示中国的人民赞同中国的政府和贸易伙伴的行为.)

以下摘自 CNN的网页:

Cafferty, who appears daily on CNN's "The Situation Room," made the remarks as host Wolf Blitzer was comparing today's China to that of 20 or 30 years ago.
"I don't know if China is any different, but our relationship with China is certainly different," Cafferty said. "We're in hock to the Chinese up to our eyeballs because of the war in Iraq, for one thing. They're holding hundreds of billions of dollars worth of our paper. We are also running hundreds of billions of dollars' worth of trade deficits with them, as we continue to import their junk with the lead paint on them and the poisoned pet food and export, you know, jobs to places where you can pay workers a dollar a month to turn out the stuff that we're buying from Wal-Mart."
"So I think our relationship with China has certainly changed," he said. "I think they're basically the same bunch of goons and thugs they've been for the last 50 years."
He issued a clarification of his remarks on Monday's "Situation Room," saying that by "goons and thugs," he meant the Chinese government, not the Chinese people. It was unclear whether China's Foreign Ministry was aware of the clarification when it held the Tuesday news conference.
In the days following his remarks, however, the Legal Immigrant Association launched an online petition condemning his statements as "racist" and "despicable" and demanding that CNN discipline Cafferty and apologize to the Chinese people. Nearly 45,000 people had signed it as of Tuesday afternoon.
In the petition, the association describes itself as "a leading organization of legal immigrants mainly comprised of people from China." According to its Web site, the nonprofit group is based in Santa Clara, California, and was founded in 2007 as an organization "dedicated to the social well-being of employment-based immigrant professionals."
The state-run English-language newspaper China Daily also said in an editorial Tuesday that an apology is called for, calling Cafferty "pathetic" and noting, "it is rare for the world audience to hear such a blatant discrimination against an ethnic group of people with such a derogatory connotation."