Andrew Galbraith writes in The Editor’s Journal of the China Economic Review that he’d been diagnosed with the H1N1 virus after he had arrived in Shanghai after an overseas flight. His story of how China’s medical bureaucracy has reverted to its old ways a la SARS is disconcerting. The doctor who diagnoses him tells him not to go to the official clinic as Galbraith would almost certainly be quarantined, suggests his patient go home and self-quarantine, and, if asked, tell no one in authority he had ever been to the clinic. It’s exactly that sort of behavior in 2003 that saw Beijing (city and central authority) so roundly criticized about its handling of SARS. It was also the cause of a complete shutdown of the country’s commercial activities, from the largest assembly plant to the smallest street kiosk. That sort of endemic legerdemain also cost foreign invested companies billions of dollars in downtime and repatriation of staff during the SARS episode.

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The Black Swans of China

Thar Be Black Dragons in China

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