To be clear, we're not talking about hundreds of thousands of people being forced to flee radiation poisioning. However, we do see a repressive communist government failing to provide proper information and essentially lying about the nature of the problem.
Thousands of residents of Harbin on Wednesday night jammed its railway station and booked out all available flights as a deadly 80km toxic slick made its way down the Songhua river, threatening to poison the north-eastern Chinese city’s water supplies.
The slick of benzene and other toxins was leaked into the river, the city’s main source of water, after a series of explosions 10 days ago at a chemicals factory 200km upriver.
Anyone wonder why we're first learning about this disaster after 10 days? There's something about Communist governments restricting information and delaying informing the public of an impending health crisis. In the former Soviet Union, the government refused to indicate that there was anything wrong until foreign governments began detecting high levels of radiation coming from the Ukraine. It was several days before the Soviets admitted there was a serious problem, and even longer before they acknowledged just how bad things were. Hundreds of thousands of people were exposed to varying levels of radiation and many are still displaced from their homes as a result of the disaster.
The growing unease was fuelled by the clumsy handling of the crisis by the city’s authorities, which at first said the water supply was being closed only for maintenance purposes. The lack of clear information spawned rumours of an imminent earthquake, which triggered panic buying of food and bottled water.
The authorities say that the polluted water should clear within 40 hours of passing the city. Considering the misinformation and lack of information provided by the Chinese government, I think a lot of people wont trust what the government says about this whole situation.
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