Rumours in China

One of the peculiar outcomes of censorship is the proliferation of rumours. I hear all sorts of strange stories all the time here—a whole car of policeman was run over by a bus, sweet potatoes you buy on the street are cooked in old chemical vats, air conditioners cause respiratory diseases (but the smog doesn't!), Bo Xilai was innocent/guilty/a victim of his own wife ... a personal favourite of mine was the rumour that the Chinese Government was overturned by coup, which turned out to be (fortunately or unfortunately) entirely untruthful. How on earth did that one start?

One particularly tragic outcome of that is that people don't know what is happening exactly when they need information most—during natural disasters. The recent heavy rains in Beijing came as a surprise to me when I received emails and messages from friends and family back home. How is it that the international media know about the local weather system before locals do? I direct you to an interesting read from the New York Review of books about the consequences of this information failure.

The outcome of all this is that nobody trusts the information that is given to them. I think that'd be an interesting topic for a PhD thesis.