MIKE WOOTTON
There is an English idiom; “don’t look a gift horse in the mouth.” It’s an old one, from St Jerome in about AD 400 and still much used today. It’s about appreciation; it’s not polite to inspect closely a gift looking for faults in it. It reflects a “middle class western value” [the things that the Chinese government are now insisting that their citizens do not adopt]. In the less developed world this idiom has minimal relevance as practicality rules, but then there should still be appreciation for a gift shouldn’t be there?