State secrets are a hard habit to break:Beijing's response to disasters hardly inspires trust
(Dec. 01, 2005)
State secrets are a hard habit to break:Beijing's response to disasters hardly inspires trust
(boxun.com)
Peter Goodspeed
National Post
824 words
29 November 2005
National Post
Secrecy is a reflex response in China's bureaucracy.
The country even has a National Administration of State Secrets that decides what is and is not classified information.
Last September, in an unprecedented outburst of liberal reform, the Chinese government announced it will no longer regard death tolls in natural disasters, such as floods and earthquakes, as state secrets.
The decision was supposed to signal a new openness in China as the country's "fourth generation" of Communist leaders, led by President Hu Jintao and Premier Wen Jiabao, entrenched themselves in power.
Only somebody forgot to drive the message home to Communist party chiefs in China's industrial northeast.
When an explosion rattled the state-owned Jilin Petrochemical Co. on the banks of the Songhua River in northeastern Jilin province two weeks ago, dumping 100 tonnes of highly toxic benzene into the water, local leaders decided to hush the whole thing up.
The benzene, a colourless, flammable liquid derived from petroleum and used as an industrial solvent and an ingredient in insecticides such as DDT, mixed with the river water in concentrations nearly 180 times higher than safety limits.
Despite the danger, Jilin's leaders remained silent. In a bid to dilute the spill, they emptied the contents of a nearby reservoir into the river.
They remained silent as the 80-kilometre toxic slick travelled downstream toward Harbin, a city of four million in neighbouring Heilongjiang province, which takes nearly 80% of its drinking water straight from the river.
Finally, six days after the chemical spill, officials in Jilin decided to warn officials in Heilongjiang of the approaching disaster.
Faced with a potential catastrophe, the local government rushed to shut down Harbin's municipal water system and then proceeded to lie, saying they were carrying out normal "repair and inspection work."
It was only when thousands of people panicked and began to surge out of the city, knowing they were being lied to but not knowing what to expect, that the government in Beijing stepped in and decided to admit to the disaster.
Nine days after the chemical spill occurred, and after Wen Jiabao, the Premier, toured Harbin, the government released details of the accident and advised more than nine million residents along the banks of the Songhua not to drink the water.
Even as water services were restored in Harbin on Sunday, fears of a long-term environmental disaster linger. Benzene, a known carcinogen, may have seeped into the groundwater or entered the food chain, poisoning fish.
Yesterday, the benzene wave flowed into Russia, entering the Amur River and posing a threat to the water supplies of a million people in Russia's Khabarovsk region.
In what appears to be a bid to deflect public animosity from the Beijing government, China's state-owned news agencies have reported a special team of investigators will study what happened and recommend punishment for those responsible.
Mr. Wen urged Chinese officials to tell the truth in any crisis and Xinhua, the state-owned news agency, praised China's Communist party for acting decisively.
"The people's servants and the public are intertwined like a rope and residents and the government have drawn close," Xinhua reported.
That, too, is probably a lie.
If anything, the crisis in Harbin has probably shaken trust in China's rulers and refreshed memories of other recent disasters that were glossed over with official lies.
In the early 1990s, as AIDS swept across China, Beijing methodically denied the existence of an epidemic.
It was only when local doctors defiantly began to report thousands of patients dying from HIV/AIDS that Beijing admitted to World Health Organization estimates of up to 10 million Chinese being infected with HIV/AIDS.
Similarly, when SARS erupted in southern China in late 2002, Chinese health officials kept quiet about the epidemic for months.
The official Chinese line was that just a handful of cases of severe acute respiratory syndrome were confined to the southern province of Guangdong and the outbreak was under control.
By April, 2003, dissident doctors blew the whistle on the government and revealed China was actually dealing with over 2,000 cases of SARS -- not 79 as the government claimed.
China's Health Minister and the Mayor of Beijing were ultimately fired and blamed for the deceptions.
But as the Harbin disaster recedes, the world is bracing for a possible bird flu epidemic and China's cult of official secrecy continues to cause concern.
Scientists have questioned China's claims to have only three cases of human infection from bird flu, when Vietnam, a neighbouring country with one-tenth of China's population, has had 91.
Source
(boxun.com)
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