From a Los Angeles Times editorial:
There’s something about the international spotlight that spurs Chinese officials to admit wrongdoing, raising doubts about whether they would have done anything without the glare.
Last month, Beijing waited until 10 days after the incident to tell the public about a factory explosion that dumped 100 tons of benzene and other chemicals into northeastern China’s Songhua River. The announcement came only after dead fish began to surface in the river that ” more to the point ” flows into Russia. A failure to alert Moscow might have prompted a serious diplomatic incident. It was China’s biggest known environmental disaster in years.
This weekend, the government belatedly admitted that police in Dongzhou, not far from Hong Kong, had killed villagers who were protesting the confiscation of their farmland and loss of access to fishing grounds without compensation.
