Photo: Colonel Dai Xu

Quotes from around China this week

“As for this recent bird flu fad, China’s top government departments shouldn’t talk it up, otherwise it will be just like SARS in 2003! At the time, the U.S. was fighting Iraq and feared China might take advantage of the situation, so it deployed a bio-psychological weapon against China. The country was thrown into turmoil, just as the U.S. had hoped. Now, the U.S. is trying the same old trick. China should take a lesson from before and respond calmly.”
- Dai Xu, a Chinese Air Force colonel on his Weibo account. Wall Street Journal

“It's very clear [to China]: If this is a buffer state, what is it good for?”
-Kurt Campbell, the State Department's top Asia official until last month, regarding North Korea’s increasingly erratic behavior. Foreign Policy

“I have a dream that one day I will be able to breathe fresh air, drink clean water and eat vegetables that aren’t poisoned. But these are biological necessities and they are also the most basic rights of humans; if we have to ‘dream’ about having these things then talking about a China Dream is just a joke.”
-  Pan Caifu, a popular blogger, on his Weibo account. The Financial Times

“If we were imagining how a terrible pandemic would unfold, this could certainly serve as an excellent script.”
- Laurie Garrett, the Senior Fellow of the Global Health Program at the Council on Foreign Relations. Foreign Policy

“Twitter, Facebook and iPads are the blue jeans of modern China and that is one reason the Party has completely blocked the first two and may be planning an assault on the third.”
-Jamil Anderlini, Beijing bureau chief for the Financial Times. The National Post.

“We really can't rely on information from other viruses. H7N9 is a new virus in humans and the pattern that it follows cannot be predicted by the patterns that we have from other influenza viruses.”
- Michael O'Leary, the World Health Organization’s representative to China. Al Jazeera.