Why the government should tell the truth.

China

Chinese officials did a fantastic job handling the recent water pollution crisis, said Sun Yingwei in a commentary for the state news agency Xinhua. It could have been catastrophic. An explosion at a chemical plant last month spilled 100 tons of benzene into the Songhua River, the main water source for Harbin City and other cities in Heilongjiang Province. Fortunately, officials acted “promptly.” They told the public in advance that water was to be cut off, so people could fill up receptacles. And they created a new water monitoring system, so future problems will be averted. As a result, “the work of handling the incident is being carried out in an orderly manner, the livelihoods of the masses are protected, the society is in order and stable, and the market is in perfect order.”

That’s not quite the whole story, said Zheng Manling in Hong Kong’s Ta Kung Pao. We thought Chinese officials had learned from the SARS debacle that “hiding unpleasant facts” creates more problems than it solves. Apparently, though, they have room for “further improvement.” In the first few days after the Nov. 13 explosion, Harbin City officials held “fierce internal debates,” first over whether to turn off the water and then over whether to tell citizens that their drinking water was filled with a hazardous, cancer-causing chemical. “In the end, those officials who advocated maintaining secrecy had the upper hand.” The city government announced that the taps would be shut off because sections of the water pipes were being rebuilt. But the people didn’t believe that story. Rumors swept through the city, people began to panic, and some started to pack up their families and flee. The chagrined Harbin government was finally forced, more than a week after the explosion, to admit the truth.

Harbin officials aren’t the only ones with some explaining to do, said Lu Zhijian in Guangzhou’s Yangcheng Wangbao. The benzene contamination originated at Jilin Petrochemical’s plant in Jilin City. Once Jilin’s officials realized that the toxic spill was downriver from them and wouldn’t harm their city, they “acted dishonorably,” failing to take any action to contain the spill. They simply “dumped the problem on others.” Only now, after widespread criticism, have the officials bothered to apologize. Such belated and grudging regrets “won’t win public approval.”

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The Chinese press is awash in such sentiments, said Lillian Yang in Hong Kong’s South China Morning Post. Mainland newspapers that usually accept the official Xinhua versions of stories abandoned that meekness and sent their own reporters to Harbin and Jilin. The result was a flurry of articles critical of the provincial government. The Shanghai Morning Post accused Jilin Petrochemical of being shifty and evasive about the blast at its plant. The China Youth Daily slammed Harbin officials for lying. If they were trying to save face, it said, they failed and instead “brought shame on themselves.”