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China reports the fifth death related to bird flu.
Pardon my skepticism, but when it comes to the Chinese government and providing the rest of the world with possibly reputation-damaging information, I can’t take their word for it – especially when it comes to the deadly combo of disease, high population and low income and sanitation. I predict that more, likely many more, than five people have died from bird flu, and that the government is perfectly aware of it.
The Chinese government has always scared me a little bit. I know I’m not exactly alone in this. “You can take this subway line to get to the mall,” a friend told me when I was visiting her in Hong Kong, “but don’t fall asleep or anything, or you’ll wake up in China.” There were some murmurings when Google agreed to censor search results in China, and, you know, there are those ongoing human rights violations that sort of got swept under the rug during the Olympics. (Not that, with China’s economic force as it is, they had to be swept very far.) Now that the tainted milk scandal that I touched on briefly before has reached new heights, and MSNBC reported today that the Chinese government is trying to do a little damage control.
Lawyers in Beijing said law officials there had nudged them to be “aware of the general picture” and to heed and have trust in the government’s handling of the scandal.
And because this is the Chinese government, I worry about how hard they “nudged” and what the consequences of not heeding the government’s handling are. I worry, too, that China has become too much a juggernaut for the world community to do anything about it if/when/as they cross the line. But, for once, the numbers that give the country its leviathan status may work against the government – there are just too many people and too many sick babies to make everyone hush and go home.
