China's uber-blogger Han Han often writes posts that either get deleted by the organs or which he takes down himself shortly after publication. These get rapidly copied, pasted and put up around the Sinosphere by his army of fans. It's one way to leverage censorship into securing a wider readership. Anyway, his post on the Wenzhou rail crash not only followed this procedure, but on this occasion also got translated and put up at China Geeks. This is excellent news, since you can read whole academic tomes speculating about how the Communist Party thinks, but you won't find a better summary in five hundred odd words:
“Every now and then, there’s an accident. The top leaders all show how worried they are. We make someone available to answer journalists’ questions. First we say we’ll give the victims 170,000 kuai apiece. Then we say we’ll give them 500,000. We fire a buddy of ours. We’ve done all that, and you still want to nitpick? How could you all be so close-minded? You’re not thinking of the big picture! Why do you want us to apologize when we haven’t done anything wrong? It’s the price of development.
That's not a million miles away from the Murdochs' original strategy.
Posted by: chjh | July 30, 2011 at 01:55 PM
The Price of Development: the great lost album by the Concrete Society.
Posted by: Alex | July 30, 2011 at 02:19 PM