"May raise questions"

A dry note below from the NYT science team. "May raise questions" is the agreed upon polite phrase for a catastrophe of practice, confidence and prospect in the Bejing Cadre. The Sichuan earthquake matter of factly revealed that what has changed in China since the Maoist nightmare of the 1976 quake and today is that the Cadre is more vain, less blood thirty, more arrogant, less cocksure and much, much more ambitious.

Sichuan Earthquake
On the afternoon of May 12, 2008, an earthquake measuring 7.9 on the Richter scale hit Sichuan Province, a mountainous region in Western China. By the next day, the death toll stood at 12,000, with another 18,000 still missing. Over 15 million people live in the affected area, including almost 4 million in the city of Chengdu. Nearly 2,000 of the dead were students and teachers caught in schools that collapsed.

Since the Tangshan earthquake in 1976, which killed over 240,000 people, China has required that new structures withstand major quakes. But the collapse of schools, hospitals and factories in several different areas around Sichuan may raise questions about how rigorously such codes have been enforced during China’s recent, epic building boom.