Chinese students at New Zealand’s Massey University staged a heated protest last week after the campus’s student newspaper used an image of Mao Zedong’s head—set atop the body of a curvaceous woman wearing a decidedly bourgeois décolletage—to satirize Cosmopolitan magazine. The lampooned title: Commupolitan. According to an article in the Manawatu Standard, a local newspaper, the Chinese students said the satire in Chaff, the student paper, was as offensive to them as cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad were to Muslims worldwide earlier this year. The protesters said making fun of Mao, the founder of China’s Communist state, was akin to lampooning Jesus, George Washington, or President Bush. They also said they deserved better treatment as foreign students who pay full fees at the university.

The incident resembled a dispute in April at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology over Chinese students’ protests of an educational Web site (The Chronicle, May 19). One MIT professor described the episode as “a case of extreme sensitivity to criticism of China, from a sense of wounded nationalism that causes certain of the students to act in irrational ways.”