JOHN GARNAUT
TheAge.com.au
05/14/2010
ON MARCH 19, Shandong farmer Li Baoxiang consented to his only son being vaccinated for swine flu. That night, eight-year-old Li Zhikang said he felt sick. By the morning his body was trembling all over. Yesterday the father stood with tears streaming down his face at Beijing Children’s Hospital as his boy struggled for life inside a crib in the intensive care unit. ”He’s my only child,” Li said. ”My own mother is sick and I cannot bring myself to tell her why we have come to Beijing. I’m such a trivial and ordinary person. I know I can’t fight against the government.”
Li’s family tragedy has become a conflict with the Chinese government because no official would investigate his claim that a dodgy vaccination had made his child sick. He tried the town, city, provincial and central governments, and various departments within each of them, only to be told each time that his problem should be taken some place else.
The person who did listen was Wang Keqin, chief reporter at the China Economic Times. Wang had earned a reputation as one of China’s leading investigative journalists after exposing how mafia groups controlled Beijing’s taxi industry, how mafia henchman had gunned down farmers at the village of Dingzhou after being called in by its Communist Party chief to resolve a land dispute, and also how collusion and cover-ups with blood transfusions in Henan province had caused a horrendous AIDS epidemic among the poorest peasants who lived there.