Potemkin China

An excellent post over at black and white cat blog (the reference is to former supreme leader Deng Xiaoping's groundbreaking dictum that it "doesn't matter if a cat is black or white so long as it catches mice," a revolutionary idea in late seventies china). It's about how corrupt local officials in the notorious province of Henan (we've written about the brave Doctor Gao Yaojie and her shameful treatment before) were preparing a Potemkin Village for the visit of Premier Wen Jiabao that included getting 1400 police to stand in as happy (and healthy, this being a so-called AIDs village where many residents are HIV positive or have AIDs, the disease contracted during corrupt blood collection/sale drives in the mid-90s) villagers. It's hard to believe that Premier Wen and his staff didn't know something was up. What he does about it (they have already arrested one extremely corrupt local party official but by many accounts his replacement is even worse), if anything surely will be a telling comment on where China is headed. If central government allows themselves to be fooled on this scale by local warlords, it is a very bad sign indeed.