Patients can recover from a disease, captains of ships can have reasonable explanations and be held responsible, but face and credibility by are terribly difficult to recover.

The act of bending the truth or ignoring something unpleasant does far more harm than any isolated, one-off tragedy. Diseases are acts of nature, ship captains around the world make mistakes – these incidents don’t represent China, but the official failure to tell the truth and openly inform do.

It’s a symptom of xenophobia – which only serves to keep China isolated and misunderstood. These instilled cultural values make China its own worst enemy.

A harmonious society is not about avoiding unpleasant truths. Evading reality only serves to create future disharmony, and dishonours every other effort that could make a real contribution. How sad.

You want to be trusted, held in esteem, given credibility, thought of as ethical, then do not insult people’s intelligence by fudging facts and hiding truths. Is this not a lesson we all learn in childhood? Lies and evasiveness compound a problem and are the most tactless way of dealing with one’s own behavior. Nobody likes a liar.

Look at what the Chinese fiddling and fibbing has actually caused; righteous writings traveling around the world adding to the general misconception because they’re out of context and not truly reflective of life here. We wouldn’t even be talking about these event if there had been open and timely truth provided.

What a way to negate all the great things the country has achieved. I’m proud to be a Chinese son-in-law, but the silly, needlessly fearful, over protective xenophobes sure make China hard to defend at times. They’re also making a mockery of opening and reform.

Sixteen Korean sailors are still missing after their ship was apparently hit by a Chinese vessel a few days ago. The Chinese ship is accused of having fled the scene. I have been enthralled by this story as it combines politics, morality, maritime law,…

The Korean families were in Yantai to make a stink, last I checked.

Thanks for the additional story links.

And cheers Cat for reminding me of the facts - to think I actually polished Xinhua stories on the subject. Regarding the 20-hour rule the first two pars of the Xinhua story say it all:

“China’s State Council yesterday issued what some commentators are calling a milestone regulation to boost official transparency by ordering government departments to be more open in reporting information.

But other scholars said the rules aren’t strong enough to prevent public officials from hiding embarrassing news.”

Charlie, interesting to hear Xinhua’s post-midnight bird flu tactics. Although never underestimate Xinhua’s general incompetence.

A case in point was the initial stages of bird flu - on several occasions CD had the information that there had been another outbreak and was ready to release it, but it had to wait until Xinhua reported it. Why did it have to wait for Xinhua? Because Xinhua was having to wait for the Ministry of Agriculture’s own newspaper to report it, because they wanted the scoop.

Which is all pretty stupid.

Of course, there were other problems with the bird flu reporting - when Xinhua did release the news it was always after midnight, presumably timed so that it was missed by many of the newspapers and was old and stale by the time the next deadline came, and put online when most people were offline.

I’m they’ll be adhering to regulations even with this type of trick - but it is hardly putting public health and the concerns of the people in first place.

http://tinyurl.com/2cwpun
http://www.gov.cn/zwgk/2007-04/24/content_593315.htm

But I am impressed by the good example the State Council has set. It passed the regulations on January 17. Premier Wen Jiabao signed them on April 5. And the public was informed… 19 days later. (Presumably every day is a working day for the State Council.)