A senior military official from China has sparked an uproar among his fellow citizens by calling the outbreak of bird flu in China an American conspiracy and downplaying the deaths from the virus.
“The country's leadership should not pay too much attention to this,” Dai Xiu, senior colonel of the People's Liberation Army and lecturer at the National Defense University, wrote on his Sina Weibo microblog on Saturday. “Otherwise, the same thing will happen as happened with SARS in 2003!”
"At that time, the US was at war in Iraq and feared that China would take advantage of the opportunity to take alternative action," he wrote. “That's why they used biopsychological weapons against China. All of China fell into chaos, which is exactly what the United States wanted. Today the States have resorted to the same old trick. China should already learn this lesson and calmly deal with the problem."
Dai's post scored nearly 30,000 shares over the weekend. Despite the fact that some users supported his comments, most of the comments were judgmental. He deleted the previous post with much the same content, ending with a sentence that caused even more outrage. "Only a few will die, but that's even less than one thousandth of the total number of car crash victims in China."
"In that case, the invention of machines by America and Germany should have been an even bigger conspiracy," Kaifu Li, a former head of Google China with great authority on Weibo, quipped.
“I'm sure the vast majority of the military will never support such a statement,” Luo Changping, deputy editor-in-chief of the financial magazine Caijing, reacted on Saturday, whose words received 63,000 shares. “Mr. Dai should take his words back and apologize to the families of the victims,” he wrote.
Dai was adamant and responded on Sunday, “Everyone knows that a group of people in China have been injected with toxins in the brain by the States,” he writes.
“And now a bunch of fake American devils have pounced on me,” he writes in the following comment. "I will not back down a half step." The senior colonel has gained nearly 40,000 new fans on Weibo during the controversy.
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Internet users compared Dai's comments to those made in 2011 by the famous nationalist professor at Peking University, Kong Qingdong. A professor of Chinese literature who calls himself a 73rd generation descendant of Confucius and one of the initiators of the Confucian Peace Prize - an alternative to the Nobel Peace Prize - said the US is waging a "climate war" with China, blaming America for Beijing smog.