Dai Xu, the Director of the Marine Security and Cooperation Research Institute and an Air Force Colonel in the People’s Liberation Army, asserted that the H7N9 virus is part of a U.S. conspiracy against China and Chinese authorities should simply ignore it. Dai posted his bird flu comment on Sina Weibo, a Twitter-like site, late Saturday night on April 6, 2013. Dai said, “As for the recent bird flu fad, China’s top government departments must not deal with it extensively. Otherwise, it will be just like SARS in 2003! At that time, the U.S. was fighting Iraq and feared China might take advantage of the situation, so it deployed a bio-psychological weapon against China. The country was thrown into turmoil, just as the U.S. had hoped. Now, the U.S. is trying the same old trick. China should learn a lesson from the past and respond calmly.”
An earlier version of the post was subsequently deleted, but multiple other users preserved it in screenshots. It ended on a different note: “A few may die, but that’s not even one-thousandth of the deaths from car accidents in China.”
Source: BBC Chinese and The Wall Street Journal, April 7 and April http://www.bbc.co.uk/zhongwen/simp/china/2013/04/130407_china_bird_flu_conspiracy.shtml
http://blogs.wsj.com/chinarealtime/2013/04/08/new-bird-flu-is-a-u-s-conspiracy-chinese-military-official-says/