“The American election again plumbs new depths in its bottom line,” read the headline of an editorial from Xinhua, the main state news agency, on Monday.

“In the farce of American politics, these blowups have been coming faster than you can turn the pages of a book,” the editorial said.

“The absence of any bottom line in party competition has already evolved into an absence of a moral bottom line,” it said. “The voters never see the lowest point, because things just keep getting even lower.”

Not everyone in China buys that official viewpoint. For quite a few Chinese, especially middle-class people in their 20s and 30s with more exposure to the world, the spectacle of parties competing for support, and of the news media taking on the candidates, is uplifting, despite all the dirt.