panda bashing

Australians use bashing to mean hostility towards a group or organisation thought to be behaving in an undesirable way.  The Macquarie Dictionary lists the following bashings:

 bank bashing

curry bashing  (attacks on the  South Asian community)

gay bashing

poofter bashing

union bashing

To this we can now add, unfortunately, panda bashing, attacks on China and suspicion of all things Chinese, probably deriving from a  national long-held racist view of the Chinese combined with a desire to support blindly the current American hostility towards China.  The underlying sense of bashing is that it is fuelled by mindless prejudice.  This term has low frequency but it sits in a well-established set of bashing terms so it has a solid foundation and is supported by its antonym panda hugging, and by the term panda diplomacy. Sadly with the interactions between Australia and China set to be antagonistic for the future, it will probably acquire a greater frequency, and the panda huggers will be matched by the panda bashers.