BEIJING -- Is it the "big one" -- the indestructible one? Perhaps not. Either way, China's inability to tell the truth has made it a threat to all of us.
In mid-2001, a Hong Kong magazine ran a front-page story about how the world's next flu pandemic would hatch in southern China and infect the rest of the world via Hong Kong. The story espoused the theory that the Spanish flu of 1918, which eventually claimed 20 million lives, had leaped from pigs to humans in southern China and traveled with Chinese laborers to the trenches of World War I.
It was no more than a theory, but on two crucial counts the magazine was deadly accurate: the two other killer pandemics of the last century, which killed about 2 million people, sprang out of China and so will the next.