Chinese citizens have embraced Valentine's Day traditions as we know them in the West: Beijing street vendors sold the requisite roses, and restaurants offered specials for cooing two-somes. But at least in one department, the mood was less than lovey-dovey.

On Thursday—our supposed day of Cupid— state-run media announced that Chinese people were "disgusted" over recent attempts by prominent Westerners to use the 2008 Summer Olympics as a means of pressuring Beijing to do more to end the conflict in Darfur. Chinese Foreign Ministry officials once again decried the "politicization" of the Olympics, in what is by now a familiar refrain.

The proximate cause was Tuesday's very public announcement that famed American Hollywood director Steven Spielberg had given up his responsibilities as an artistic adviser to Olympic ceremonies because of China's support for Khartoum, as well as a letter signed by nine Nobel Peace laureates urging Chinese President Hu Jintao to change his nation's policies toward Sudan.

To get a taste of Chinese reaction, I checked out the popular online bulletin board websites (BBS's), where anonymous posting permits almost free expression -- or, at least, freer than what you normally encounter in the real world.

Several users of the China News BBS, such as one using the cybernym wo shi zhongguoren ("I am Chinese"), were indignant at what is viewed as American intrusion across national borders: "The U.S. has spent a lot of money to buy weapons and engage in war and interrupt other countries' internal affairs and interfere with other countries' elections."

Qingxing de ren ("Clear-headed person") questioned U.S. global authority and self-righteousness: "Is the United States perfect? Is the U.S. qualified to comment on other countries? The U.S. should do its own thing first—and then talk about others."

Cultural relativism is another recurring theme. Qingxing de ren exclaimed "We will only get to know what is the perfect world once we go to heaven!" -- and questioned whether democracy and human rights are "a fact" to begin with.

A self-described scholar from the Beijing-based People's University took a similarly cynical view on the BBS called CENET (China Economy Education Net), when he pointed out that "every country has its own benefits [equally]. America is an example: even Westerners don't always consider themselves right." The world doesn’t function according to America’s values and nonetheless "the Earth continues to turn as usual," the Netizen said.

Some Chinese see Spielberg's jettisoning of his Olympic duties as an opportunity to produce an independent and "purely China-style opening ceremonies", as one anonymous blog post found on the Solidot BBS put it.

Nationalism also tinged a comment by Wo shi zhongguoren, from the China News BBS, who agreed that "the Olympics is our deal,” and wondered, “why should we depend on Americans?"

So at least for St. Valentine's Day, any romance between China and the West -- as far as the Games are concerned, anyway --  felt more like the Big Chill. Love is not necessarily lost, however: here there's also a traditional Chinese Valentine's Day. It occurs on the seventh day of the seventh lunar month—which this year falls on August 7th, the eve of the Olympics opening ceremony.