perfidy

Kudos and all for China for getting a space program together, yeah ok, and I've congratulated them elsewhere for leaping forward to 1958.

But for all the spacefaring feats that nation may achieve, there's still mindbendingly awful systemic problems in China, like this one. China has a horrid recent history of interior management-- stealing cookware to make home steel smelters, encouraging schoolchildren to kill their teachers, starving thousands if not millions in the name of so-called progress, etc., etc., and that legacy seriously undermines any claims to outer-space glory. Worse, the nation's leaders seem not to have learned much from their past failures.

In the mid 1990's the communist party authorities in Henan encouraged poor rural farmers to sell their blood.

Mobile collection units toured rural villages. Millions of villagers took up the call. But the blood collectors ignored even the most basic standards of hygiene. Dirty equipment was used over and over. Donor blood was mixed together, the plasma removed, and then what remained pumped back into the donors blood streams.

HIV spread out of control through the whole blood collection system.

No-one for sure how many people were infected, at least 500,000, maybe more. . . . .

Having infected so many of its own people, China's communist rulers are now doing everything they can to stop the outside world from finding out.