I wish you-all would shed light on the rhetorical advice which consists of treating various collectivities, objects, aggregations, and even streets (Wall) and buildings (Whitehall, the White House, the Kremlin) as if they were sentient, vocal beings. Thus: "China Resisted U.S. Pressure on Rights of Nobel Winner"; "China Moves to Block Foreign News on Nobel Ceremony" (N Y Times, 12/9/10); "...this city [of Kristianstad, Sweden] vowed a decade ago to wean itself from fossil fuels" (N Y T, 12/10). It's a very common journalistic practice. "Anthropomorphism" may be the philosophy, but is not the name of the device. Reification, maybe. I lean toward an old usage of the label Personation (whereas IMpersonation is one person pretending to be another person). Can you help?

WELCOME DICKMATE

from Silva Rhetoricae:

personification
the counterfait in personation


Reference to abstractions or inanimate objects as though they had human qualities or abilities. The English term for prosopopeia or ethopoeia.


Examples
O beware, my lord, of jealousy!
It is the green-ey'd monster which doth mock
The meat it feeds on.
—Iago in Shakespeare's Othello 3.3.165-67

The insatiable hunger for imagination preys upon human life
—Samuel Johnson

personification

Or either that or synechdoche, one. Or something like that.

I think it may be anthropomorphic personification. In which people ascribe human attributes to objects and they seem to turn into them (sorry thath explanation was a bit rubbish!). A good example is DEATH...you know the guy in the cloak with the scythe...kills people...he was given human attributes and now seems to have run off with them?

rhetorical devices

Isn't it plain old-fashioned metonymy (link)?

I like that word metonym Z (thanks for link)
now I see how its different from a metaphor...not that I thought about it before!