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Originally Posted by Doctor Dre
Thing is, they don't really gotta tell people about the death count ... unlike the media arround here . There are probably more deads there then in NO...
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Actually things have changed in China, allot of stuff gets reported now. Please have access to the internet with proxys and shit spreads really fast. I think they have more internet users than the US.
Great wall of secrecy is crumbling
From Jane Macartney in Beijing
TAKING a giant step towards greater transparency, China?s highly secretive Government is to publish death tolls from natural disasters. The move could prevent the kind of cover-up by regional authorities two years ago over the spread of Sars.
Hu Jintao, the President, responded by sacking senior officials and declaring a need for more openness.
The National Administration for the Protection of State Secrets said: ?Declassification of these figures is conducive to boosting our disaster prevention and relief work.?
The decision is a significant step towards ?ruling according to law? and ?building a transparent government?, it said. Such a sensitive step would not have been taken without President Hu?s approval. It is almost certainly part of his drive to portray himself as a man of the people in the image of early Communist leaders.
Xiao Zhou, Professor of Sociology at People?s University in Beijing, said: ?This is a very big step forward from the days of Mao. Then everything was a secret, including Mao?s birthday, his height, his weight, his wife?s name; and it was the same with natural disasters.?
Deaths in natural disasters have gone mostly unreported because of secrecy laws and because the Communist Party saw them as damaging to its reputation. But in recent years, with the proliferation of local newspapers, bad news has been harder to suppress. Reports of disasters appear with increasing frequency and little delay.
Tens of millions of people are believed to have died in natural and man-made disasters since the Communists gained power in 1949. An estimated 20 million to 40 million people died during a three-year famine that began in 1959 and has been blamed on Mao Zedong?s Great Leap Forward in 1958, in which he urged farmers to leave the fields and make steel in back-yard furnaces.
Attempts to obtain figures from disasters, from earthquakes to typhoons, can result in jail terms for stealing, or leaking, state secrets, which can be anything that affects China?s interests or security. The Communist Party often uses the hazy definition to silence critics. It has been imbued with secrecy since its foundation as an underground movement whose members were hunted by warlords, rival Nationalists and Japanese invaders.
Mr Hu, who took office in 2002, must feel more confident about his power as he consolidates his authority through the provinces, installing his own people into key positions. But he remains an authoritarian leader of a secretive government.
It was unclear if figures for past disasters would be published. Attempts to obtain details from the National Administration for the Protection of State Secrets were in vain: the telephone number is classified.
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article...777821,00.html