HE'S AMERICAN, IT'S WHAT WE DO:

Now it's getting personal. After months of sniping at American policy, China has turned its fire on Washington's senior diplomat in this former British colony.

In an unusual public rebuke, the Hong Kong branch of China's Ministry of Foreign Affairs accused U.S. Consul General Stephen Young of breaching diplomatic norms and ignoring "solemn warnings" to keep quiet about democracy in the region, which since 1997 has been part of China.

The scolding by China's top diplomat here follows a series of articles in Communist Party-controlled media denouncing Young -- who served in Kyrgyzstan during a democratic uprising there in 2005 -- as part of an American plot to spread disorder and keep China down.

"Wherever he goes, there is trouble and so-called color revolution," said Wen Wei Po, a pillar of the party's still mostly secret political apparatus in Hong Kong. The paper described Young -- the son of an Army officer who fought in Korea and Vietnam and served as a military adviser in Taiwan -- as coming from "an anti-China, anti-communist family."

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