KEY POINTS:
It has been a hectic fortnight in China. President Hu Jintao has been whizzing around Asia, flattering the Indian elite with his state visit and insulting them by rushing on to Pakistan. The Indians usually expect foreign heads of state to devote a trip exclusively to them.
China's
foreign policy is getting more important by the day. You realise this when you visit countries bordering China, rather than from living in China itself. It's only since speaking to various India experts that I have realised how seriously India is taking China, especially in terms of being a rival for energy resources.
I am getting worried about the rise of China's influence on the world. Let's take a look at what's recently been happening at the United Nations.
The UN is now clearly in China's sights. The Chinese press has been blowing the nationalist horn about the elevation to the top post at the World Health Organisation - a subsidiary of the UN - of Margaret Chan, a Chinese national and previously Hong Kong's health director.
This is mind-boggling. Chan has been under serious attack in Hong Kong for allowing the Sars crisis of 2003 to explode in Hong Kong, despite having one of the most sophisticated health systems in Asia.
In 2004, Chan and several other public health officials were publicly criticised by a government commission after 2000 Hong Kong people were infected by the disease.
About 300 died, only a few dozen less than in China - a country far poorer, with 200 times the population, and a health system that is almost non-existent outside the major cities.
Not surprisingly, the crisis triggered a great deal of dissatisfaction with the way the crisis was handled.
China's central government eventually woke up to how much its officials were lying about the extent of the disease. The Chinese Health Minister and the Mayor of Beijing were fired - the first time in recent Chinese history that officials were publicly made to pay the price for the mistakes of their underlings.
What infuriated people in Hong Kong was that the way its own officials appeared to have waited for the Chinese central government to take the lead in unmasking the censorship.
Remember the infection exploded in Guangdong, the province adjacent to Hong Kong, before hitting Hong Kong itself.
The suspicion is that the unelected bureaucrats in Hong Kong were too afraid of offending their rulers in Beijing (despite their supposed 50-year period of independence following the 1997 handover) to liaise quickly and forcefully with the WHO about the epidemic that was bubbling just over the border.
Chan left Hong Kong, with almost unseemly haste, in late 2003 to join the WHO. With breathtaking irony, she was appointed director of communicable diseases and pandemic planning. This for the person on whose watch two senior health personnel visited Sars wards, apparently oblivious to the risk of contagion, only to fall ill later.
So poorly prepared was the Hong Kong health system that the single biggest block of Sars victims caught the bug in hospital.
The other problem with her appointment this month is related to the network of personal relationships that mainland political culture casts over whatever it touches.
Chan was openly backed by China, and she now owes the Chinese Government a debt, in particular to those senior individuals who have provided this elite role to her on a silver platter.
Of course, Chan denies owing them anything. But she's playing a dangerous game if she has no intention of helping them out in return. The most ethical course of action, given what she had learned about the callousness and dishonesty of the mainland government during 2003, would surely have been to politely decline.
I find it extraordinary that the country that gave us the fright of our lives in 2003 is now having its favoured candidate promoted to the first line of defence against the many epidemics which are regularly sweeping out of China - remember the bird flu in the late 1990s? Not to mention the 1919 influenza epidemic, which killed more people than World War I.
And it's clear that the Chinese Government hasn't improved its attitude to allowing accurate and important information to flourish.
When a Hong Kong university researcher indicated that he might have uncovered a new strain of bird flu this year, he was deluged with abuse by Chinese bureaucrats. It was so inappropriate that one a senior academic felt obliged to come out and publicly chastise the Chinese Government for its intemperate mode of discourse.
