MCLC: PLA officer blames US for H7N9

[Denton, Kirk]

MCLC LIST
From: Kevin Carrico <kjc83 at cornell.edu>
Subject: PLA officer blames US for H7N9
***********************************************************

Source: SCMP (4/8/13):
http://www.scmp.com/comment/blogs/article/1209796/pla-officer-calls-h7n9-vi
rus-us-bio-psychological-weapon

PLA officer calls H7N9 virus a US 'bio-psychological weapon'
by Patrick Boehler

A senior military official has caused an outrage among netizens for
calling the current avian flu outbreak in mainland China an American
conspiracy and belittling a string of deaths from the virus.

“The national leadership should not pay too much attention to it,” Dai Xu,
senior colonel with the People’s Liberation Army’s air force and lecturer
at the National Defence University, wrote on his Sina Weibo micro-blog on
Saturday <http://weibo.com/1571497285/zqWOWFPoL>. “Or else, it’ll be like
in 2003 with Sars!”

“At that time, America was fighting in Iraq and feared that China would
take advantage of the opportunity to take other actions,” he wrote. “This
is why they used bio-psychological weapons against China. All of China
fell into turmoil and that was exactly what the US wanted. Now, the US is
using the same old trick. China should have learned its lesson and should
calmly deal with the problem.”

Dai’s post has been shared some 30,000 times over the weekend. While some
netizens supported his remarks, most comments were critical. He had
deleted an earlier almost identical post
<http://weibo.com/1646068663/zqWL3frmK> that ended with a sentence that
caused even more outrage. “Only a few will die, but that’s not even a
one-thousandth of those who die in car crashes in China.”

Said one comment: “In that case, the invention of cars by the US and
Germany must have been an ever greater conspiracy,” Kai-fu Lee, the former
head of Google China and one of the most influential voices on Weibo,
quipped in a reply <http://weibo.com/1197161814/zr2CvuKZe>.
“I’m confident that the vast majority of soliders would not endorse this,”
Luo Changping, deputy editor of the financial magazine Caijing, wrote in a
reaction on Saturday <http://weibo.com/1646068663/zqWL3frmK> that has
since been shared some 63,000 times. “Mr Dai must step down and apologise
to the families of the diseased.”

Dai was unapologetic in his reply on Sunday. “It is common knowledge that
a group of people in China have been injected with mental toxin by the
US,” he wrote <http://weibo.com/1571497285/zr3V26IPr>.

“Now, a group of fake American devils are attacking me,” he wrote in
another post <http://weibo.com/1571497285/zr19c8LJm>. “I will not retreat
even half a step.” The senior colonel gained some 40,000 new followers on
Weibo in the course of the dispute. He was not available for immediate
comment.

Netizens compared <http://e.weibo.com/1744259092/zr46ykSsh> Dai’s comment
with one made by the outspoken nationalist Peking University Professor
Kong Qingdong in 2011. The 73rd-generation descendant of Confucius and
co-initiator of the Confucius Peace Prize, an alternative to the Nobel
Peace Prize, said the US was waging
<http://weibo.com/1198367585/xwb1LfHuI> a “climate war’ with China,
blaming the country for Beijing’s smog.