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Opinion | PLA officer calls H7N9 virus a US 'bio-psychological weapon'
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A senior military official has caused an outrage among netizens for calling the current avian flu outbreak in mainland China an American conspiracy and belittling a string of deaths from the virus.
“The national leadership should not pay too much attention to it,” Dai Xu, senior colonel with the People’s Liberation Army’s air force and lecturer at the National Defence University, wrote on his Sina Weibo micro-blog on Saturday. “Or else, it’ll be like in 2003 with Sars!”
“At that time, America was fighting in Iraq and feared that China would take advantage of the opportunity to take other actions,” he wrote. “This is why they used bio-psychological weapons against China. All of China fell into turmoil and that was exactly what the US wanted. Now, the US is using the same old trick. China should have learned its lesson and should calmly deal with the problem.”
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Dai’s post has been shared some 30,000 times over the weekend. While some netizens supported his remarks, most comments were critical. He had deleted an earlier almost identical post that ended with a sentence that caused even more outrage. “Only a few will die, but that’s not even a one-thousandth of those who die in car crashes in China.”
“In that case, the invention of cars by the US and Germany must have been an ever greater conspiracy,” Kai-fu Lee, the former head of Google China and one of the most influential voices on Weibo, quipped in a reply.
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“I’m confident that the vast majority of soliders would not endorse this,” Luo Changping, deputy editor of the financial magazine Caijing, wrote in a reaction on Saturday that has since been shared some 63,000 times. “Mr Dai must step down and apologise to the families of the deceased.”
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