Q: Do you perform living pancreas transplants?

A: We do not perform living pancreas transplants on foreign patients.

Until I read that and made a highly disturbing yet almost unavoidable inference, I had been skeptical of FLG claims. Not surprisingly, the hospitals in the report either took down or modified their webpages.

If it were a forgery, why wouldn’t the Chinese government just say so instead of apparently getting Google to delete it? Why cover one’s tracks if one has nothing to hide?

Well, I could think of a bunch of reasons for people wanting something like that to not exist, even if it is fake, just because of the headache.

There will be people who assume that if the government is denying it, then it must be true (look at the 9/11 inside job conspiracy theorists), and the Chinese government was dealing with enough death and mayhem without having their people attacked by an angry public who thought they had been left to die by the authorities.

Those with the means to do it (and the previous modus operandi of making unpleasant things disappear to the far reaches of the countryside) might opt to just make it disappear. Especially Beijing, methinks.

Within 24 hours of the earthquake, I found on the Wiki page a reference to a Wenchuan County government webpage refuting rumors of an impending earthquake. The page had already disappeared from the government website but was still viewable in Google cache. I read the page. It listed several rumors, including (to the best of my recollection) a seismologist’s warning, evacucations, and strange animal behavior, and denied all of them to be true. The webpage announcement was dated the day before the earthquake. It disappeared from the cache within a day or two after I viewed it. I believe the webpage was authentic because a) it was in Google cache so soon after the quake: and b) it disappeared from the cache so soon after it appeared on Wiki. If it were a forgery, why wouldn’t the Chinese government just say so instead of apparently getting Google to delete it? Why cover one’s tracks if one has nothing to hide?

I cannot address the science of earthquake prediction. I can only state that I saw the webpage described above.

Far be it from me to defend Chinese authorities, but such a document’s existence the day before the quake seems like it would just be dumb luck, but dumb luck that could cause massive rioting that could leave even more dead. (As I noted before, dumb luck can play cruel tricks, like the Kyoto earthquake happening exactly one year after Japanese authorities said they wouldn’t have suffered damage like that found in the Northridge earthquake.)

But maybe you’re onto something, which is why I’m asking. The latter half of this post talks about the highly speculative possibility that poor planning in China may have led to the earthquake, and this “information” is not reaching the Chinese people.

So, Sonagi, whaddya got?

Thanks Sonagi, for some reason I hadn’t considered that angle at all. Joshua comments on this issue in 2006; more discussion of how China’s internet lockjaw hampers the refugee issue would be helpful. I don’t read all of the hearings, but to my knowledge the internet censorship thing never comes up in Congressional hearings that deal with China-DPRK relations. Perhaps this is another example of where coalition-building with relevant people inside China, like Ai Weiwei, might be possible although everyone’s ultimate goals are slightly different.

China may be a bridge to the internet for North Koreans (I learned that people are using wireless connections in Hyesan, for instance), but it’s still the Chinese internet!

Something else relates: I have done a small amount of translating about Chinese internet censorship, started an absolutely terrible Chinese blog on account of WordPress being blocked in China (along with One Free Korea), but yesterday I blog a story about Chinese espionage in Canada and cyber-warfare and all of a sudden, for the first time, I have lots of funny hits from the PRC. Go figure.

Joshua has three link-laden posts on the summer cyber-attacks here. I was never quite clear on the rumor that DPRK had set up some crazy academy for such things in the second floor of a building in Sinuiju.

As to the main point, your a)-d) make plenty of sense, especially c). Some kid could have whipped that document up in ten minutes in a smog-choked internet cafe, although your point d) would still apply to him, perhaps? Probably the most disturbing aspect comes back to your comment about Google, whose complicity with PRC web-crawling and censorship could certainly be argued to be hampering the free discussion of the North Korean refugee issue in China. Whether or not the Badaogou police documents are forged, that much is certainly true.

According to the guy’s profile, he is an American living in Chengu and has a spouse or partner. From his photo sets, one can conclude that he’s well-traveled and has a strong interest in human rights and social issues in China. I left a comment asking for a link to the source and will go back and send him a message, too. Once I finish my housework, I’ll sniff around at 163.com and see if I can locate the image. My gut feeling is that it is a fake because a) it has surfaced 6 years after the alleged incident; b) there’s no clear source; c) Chinese netizens are a creative bunch; and d) Chinese with access to this document aren’t going to risk imprisonment for leaking state secrets.