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bjbj,(,( First Dead Pigs, Now Angry (Plague-Ridden) Birds Visit Beautiful Shanghai! Hello and
welcome to China Uncensored, I m your host and visionary shaman, Chris Chappell. The
gods are angry! At least, you d be forgiven for believing that if you re, say, a Chinese
villager who lives somewhere near Shanghai. First, tens of thousands of local pigs died
and fell into the Huangpu River under mysterious circumstances. Then, you start hearing about
new cases of the dreaded bird flu, striking dead four people in the region and two nearby.
But for sophisticated, middle class urban types, it s a godsend Shanghai s finally catching
up in the rankings for top cities facing imminent apocalyptic disaster! After all, for years
Asia biggest and most prosperous city was Tokyo, where the city s most popular form
of recreation is watching itself be crushed by space moths or decimated by bioengineered
pseudo-mystical cyborgs that are trying to obliterate mankind. Or something like that.
That one went a little over my head, to be honest. Anyway, in comparison, a river full
of pork and a new strain of deadly super influenza seem almost mediocre. But China s authorities
don t seem to mind, they ve reported on both stories, without even seeming to try for a
massive cover-up. The news coverage was a little slow, and it lagged behind public reporting
on Weibo and other websites, but still; the news actually reported something big, bad
and dangerous happening in China. That s like Russian news agencies reporting that Vladimir
Putin throws like a girl. Of course, it s worth looking at some historical context.
When the crisis over SARS hit in late 2002, news was relentlessly suppressed until so
many had been infected that it would have been very hard not to acknowledge the problem.
Eventually, thousands caught the disease and hundreds died, and the failed cover-up gave
the Chinese regime a major publicity black eye. This television station was one of the
very few media that initially broke news of the SARS crisis. Now Chinese citizens using
Weibo and similar tools are also able to push official media into reporting on some stories
but only the facts that they absolutely have to. But when it comes to problems that no
one has publicized online, or that are totally censored from the Internet, there s still
no guarantee the Communist Party will even acknowledge their existence. For instance,
are there any unknown bird flu cases besides those already reported? Did those pigs communicate
any diseases to humans? Who knows! So for Shanghai residents, the best way to stay safe
might be to keep your cell-phone handy, take pictures of any weird animal corpses you come
across, and try to get them online before the black vans show up. As for those outside
China, why should we care about a few censored epidemics here and there? After all, Shanghai
s so far away, and germs are really, really small it seems VERY unlikely that they could
travel all the way to somewhere I d be affected. Well, that s it for today! Hate to run, but
I ve got to get to the arrivals terminal at JFK airport. hC~; [Content_Types].xml #!MB
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