Hu Xijin — the former war correspondent who is now the outspoken editor of China’s nationalist tabloid, the Global Times — was caught off guard last week when votes for Donald Trump came rolling in. But he recovered quickly. The “snobbish” western media misled the world, he posted indignantly, about the man he once wrote should not be written off as a “jumping clown”.

Few people in China have shaped debate on foreign affairs like the 56-year-old Mr Hu. For 11 years he has been editor-in-chief of the Global Times, a daily mix of international news, military fan club and shrill commentary that has become the main window on the world for many Chinese. Mr Hu combines a boyish fascination with wars and weapons with a scorched-earth argumentative approach. That has won him as many enemies among China’s western-leaning “rightists” as friends on the ascendant left.

The Global Times reaches about 15m people a day in China, he says, through subscriptions, website views (it is the third most popular news site in the country) and social media followers on Weibo, China’s version of Twitter, and WeChat, the increasingly popular mobile phone app. Its heavily subsidised English-language edition has become a favoured, if unofficial, platform for broadcasting Beijing’s version of events to an international audience, thanks to a bolder and more readable style than most other state media. That puts the paper at a historic high in terms of influence, Mr Hu claims.