Pepper Spraying Cop may well be on his way to claiming a permanent place in the American political meme hall of fame, but he’s so far garnered mixed reviews from the world’s most sophisticated consumers of online satire: Chinese Internet users.

The term Pepper Spraying Cop refers, of course, to Lt. John Pike, the University of California, Davis police officer who infamously pepper-sprayed a passel of peaceful Occupy-movement protestors last week and who has since, in the words of Salon’s Mary Elizabeth Williams, been “rocking more memes than a Weezer video.”

Lt. Pike’s well-documented encounter with the Occupy protestors has inspired everything from an @PepperSprayCop Twitter feed to a series of bitingly funny pepper-spray reviews on Amazon. But it is a series of iconic images Photoshopped to include the policeman and his can of pepper spray that have done the most to catapult him to global infamy.

The images – which show Lt. Pike pepper spraying everyone from Lee Harvey Oswald to the picnickers in George Seurat’s “La Grande Jatte” — have spread widely on the Chinese Internet, where many hailed them with long strings of animated smiley face and thumbs-up emoticons.

Many others, however, were underwhelmed.

“Their satire and Celestial Kingdom satire are not on the same level,” quipped one user of the popular Sina Weibo microblogging service writing under the handle YEJ-YE. “I express disdain for the satire skills of the American imperialists.” Another Weibo user, jedicat, was likewise unimpressed. “The Photoshopping on these images really isn’t inspiring.”

Internet satire is a highly refined art in China, where critics of abuse of power are forced to contend with a vast and highly sophisticated censorship apparatus designed to contain the spread of public outrage. As a result, China watcher Brook Larmer recently wrote in a detailed look at Chinese Internet humor, “Chinese bloggers have become masters of comic subterfuge.”

Photo-editing software is among the favorite weapons of China’s cyber-satirists, as illustrated in July with Internet users’ take-no-prisoners response to the clumsy attempt by a local government website to fake a road inspection by top officials.

While Chinese state media have generally steered clear of reporting on the Occupy protests since an initially flurry of coverage in October, they have nevertheless embraced the Lt. Pike story. Footage of the pepper spray incident made a prominent appearance in state broadcaster CCTV’s main evening news show on Sunday. And on Thursday the website of the Communist Party mouthpiece People’s Daily published several dozen of the Pepper Spray Cop images.

The notion that police in the U.S. would respond in such a way to a peaceful protest has proven disappointing to many in China, with one blogger warning: “Don’t entertain any illusions about the United States – if we want to change the current situation, we have to rely on ourselves.”

Meanwhile, a joke circulating widely on Weibo takes both governments to task (in Chinese):

Chinese journalist: “President Obama, how do you account for an American police officer using pepper spray on citizens?” Obama laughs: “Are you saying we should have used tanks?”

One of the more popular Pepper Spray Cop images – that of Lt. Pike blasting “Tank Man” from the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests – somehow did not make it into the People’s Daily slideshow.

– Josh Chin. Follow him on Twitter @joshchin

In recent years, China has re-invigorated its support for leading state-owned enterprises in sectors it considers important to “economic security,” explicitly looking to foster globally competitive national champions.

China continues to lose arable land because of erosion and economic development.

The People’s Republic of China is the world’s second largest economy after the United States by both nominal GDP ($5 trillion in 2009) and by purchasing power parity ($8.77 trillion in 2009).

Some economists believe that Chinese economic growth has been in fact understated during much of the 1990s and early 2000s, failing to fully factor in the growth driven by the private sector and that the extent at which China is dependent on exports is exaggerated.

China is the world’s largest producer of rice and is among the principal sources of wheat, corn (maize), tobacco, soybeans, peanuts (groundnuts), and cotton.

China has acquired some highly sophisticated production facilities through trade and also has built a number of advanced engineering plants capable of manufacturing an increasing range of sophisticated equipment, including nuclear weapons and satellites, but most of its industrial output still comes from relatively ill-equipped factories.

China’s ongoing economic transformation has had a profound impact not only on China but on the world.

Both forums will start on Tuesday.

” Although the figure is already “quite amazing,” the volume is “not large enough” considering China’s economic growth and local companies’ expanding demand for international opportunities, Shen said.

China is expected to have 200 million cars on the road by 2020, increasing pressure on energy security and the environment, government officials said yesterday.

Although China is still a developing country with a relatively low per capita income, it has experienced tremendous economic growth since the late 1970s.

Even with these improvements, agriculture accounts for only 20% of the nation’s gross national product.

Except for the oasis farming in Xinjiang and Qinghai, some irrigated areas in Inner Mongolia and Gansu, and sheltered valleys in Tibet, agricultural production is restricted to the east.

Horses, donkeys, and mules are work animals in the north, while oxen and water buffalo are used for plowing chiefly in the south.

Coal is the most abundant mineral (China ranks first in coal production); high-quality, easily mined coal is found throughout the country, but especially in the north and northeast.

Alumina is found in many parts of the country; China is one of world’s largest producers of aluminum.

China also has extensive hydroelectric energy potential, notably in Yunnan, W Sichuan, and E Tibet, although hydroelectric power accounts for only 5% of the country’s total energy production.

The iron and steel industry is organized around several major centers (including Anshan, one of the world’s largest), but thousands of small iron and steel plants have also been established throughout the country.

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Chinese Internet Users Shrug at Pepper Spraying Cop