“The Journal has fudged the issue and dodged responsibility with the excuse of independence between news coverage and opinions,” Zhao said in the first face-to-face briefing since the coronavirus outbreak forced conferences to be shifted online three weeks ago.

“It is out of reason. Who is in charge of The Wall Street Journal? Who should apologise?

“The Wall Street Journal has the arrogance for abusive expression, but how come it does not have the courage to apologise?” Zhao said. “There is only one media agency called the WSJ. Since it insists on going its own way, it should bear the corresponding consequences.”

With more than 240,000 Twitter followers, Zhao – one of the first Chinese diplomats to open an official account on the social media site – is known for getting into heated online confrontations with China’s critics as he defends the government’s actions in bellicose tweets.

The opinion piece, written by Walter Russell Mead, a professor at Bard College in New York, and published on February 3, said the Covid-19 crisis was a reminder that China’s power remained brittle.

Although the phrase “sick man of Asia” originated in the mid-19th century, when the declining Ottoman Empire was described as the “sick man of Europe”, it was later applied to Britain’s post-imperial troubles. For China, it has humiliating echoes of the late 19th and early 20th century when China, forced to sign a series of unequal treaties with foreign imperial powers, was called the “sick man of East Asia”.

On Thursday, the foreign ministry called the headline racially discriminatory and lacking both respect for facts and professional ethics, adding it reserved the right to take further action against the newspaper.

The three expelled Journal journalists – none of whom was involved in writing the opinion piece or giving it its controversial headline – were given five days to leave the country.

The Journal, for its part, has expressed regret over the headline but has neither amended it nor issued a formal apology.

The expelled Journal trio are deputy bureau chief Josh Chin and reporter Chao Deng, both of whom are US nationals, and Philip Wen, an Australian. Agence France-Presse said its reporter saw Chin and Wen checking in at Beijing’s main international airport and passing through security checkpoints on Monday. Deng, who has been reporting from Wuhan, ground zero of the outbreak, was still in the city, AFP reported.

The Washington Post reported on Sunday that the Journal’s China staff had sent an email signed by 53 employees to the newspaper’s parent company on Thursday, urging the newspaper to apologise for the headline.

“This is not about editorial independence or the sanctity of the divide between news and opinion. It is not about the content of Dr Mead’s article. It is about the mistaken choice of a headline that was deeply offensive to many people, not just in China,” the email said, according to reports in The Washington Post and The New York Times.

“We find the argument that no offence was intended to be unconvincing: Someone should have known that it would cause widespread offence. If they didn’t know that, they made a bad mistake, and should correct it and apologise.”

But a Journal spokesman said the newspaper’s position had not changed, according to the reports.