Plumbing the depths

Of naivety and ignorance in Chinese academe, that is. I've been editing for the think-tank again. All day. The English, actually, wasn't all that bad for the most part (at least, until we got into the last quarter of the paper, where it is obligatory to mouth convoluted amalgams of meaningless CCP-speak platitudes, which seemingly cannot be rendered into English sentences of less than 50 or 60 words in length). But the levels of scholarly acumen - and even basic general knowledge - were so dismal as to beggar belief. Today's topic was international health policy - disease prevention and control as an aspect of 'non-traditional security'. Hm, potentially quite interesting. And a topic on which I am perhaps slightly better informed than the average man-in-the-street. I would not, however, have expected to be better informed than the writers of a "leading academic paper" on the subject. But then..... I can be bothered to use the Internet to check on stuff I'm not sure about. It seems Chinese academics can't. The authors of this paper early on made the astounding assertion that this was a field that had "scarcely been studied before". Egad! Well, I suppose it might be true in China, but in most of the rest of the world it's been a key focus of research for at least the past, what, 20, 30, 40 years? I mean, what the hell else does the WHO and the CDC do? That was a pretty strong indication of the sloppiness that was to follow. Amongst the egregious factual errors I corrected (and correcting facts is not really part of my remit; I'm supposed to be just rendering the English more intelligible): An outbreak of Oropouche fever in Belém, Brazil, in 1960 was said to have killed 11,000 people. According to my researches, this disease is rarely fatal, and the 11,000 figure in this instance was the number of reported cases, not the number of fatalities. The outbreak of plague in India in 1994 was twice placed in 1996 (despite the quoted source having '1994' in its title), while the location of the outbreak was elliptically referred to only as "a city in India". And the disease was called 'bubo' (which is, of course, only a symptom of the disease). Malaria was said to be a viral disease. No, it's caused by a single-celled organism, a protist. Hepatitis was said to be caused by a bacterium. No, the pathogenic forms of hepatitis are all caused by viruses. Yellow fever and 'blood fever' were listed as examples of viruses that have crossed over from animals into humans. 'Blood fever', as far as I can discover, does not exist. I assume they meant haemorrhagic fever - but that's a group of diseases categorised by the dominant symptom, not a single disease (Marburg fever - given later in this list, without any apparent awareness of the repetition involved - would have served as an example). Yellow fever might have originated in other animals (well, I think all viruses do); but it's been in the human population, with humans virtually its only host species, for 500 or 600 years now, so it's not a very apposite example in the context of a discussion of newly emergent disease threats. And, oh yes, China's handling of the SARS crisis was held up as a shining example of transparency and co-operation, giving blamelessly full reporting to the WHO and other international agencies and providing necessary information to its own populace. Choke, splutter.... (I managed to excise that bit, not because it was objectionable nonsense, but on the [more tactful?] grounds that these sentences were so mangled in their English as to be almost irredeemable, and were embedded in the midst of a hugely long paragraph to which they had absolutely no relevance whatsoever.) Also, the poor authors clearly had no idea of the distinction between 'security' and 'securitization' (and this is, arguably, an even more complex matter in international relations than it is in the world of finance), despite the fact that this was the crux of their thesis. Oh yes, and they were rather confused by the fact that the foreign academic whose work they were principally ripping off had a double-barrelled surname. They chose to separate the barrels, referring to him in all the footnotes (well, at least they were giving him citations) and the text as if he had a middle name ending in a hyphen, and then giving the bibliographical references under the last part of his surname only. Whoops. Hm, what else? Well, there were scores of figures quoted (mostly monetary amounts: GDP, health spending, estimated economic losses from disease outbreaks) - with no indication of the relevant timeframes, and often with no currency specified (you can't really assume that it's US dollars - even if they say 'dollars'; and that was the most they ever said; quite often they didn't say anything at all - when they're talking about Hong Kong and Singapore). They were rather light on citations. And the citations they did have were almost entirely for secondary sources. You know, when they're quoting WHO reports, it's really not that hard to go to their website and download the original documents - rather than citing a passing reference in an article in Science Now 4 years later. And while a few heavyweight print publications like The Economist and The Washington Post might have sufficient respectability to be quoted as sources in an academic paper, I don't think Sina.com (China's leading web portal, but hardly an internationally respected news purveyor) or even CNN really quite cut it. Honestly - there were a couple of citations from Sina! Ah, but that's only my Pet Peeve No. 2 about this particular article. Yes, really. Are you ready for this? Make sure you're sitting safely in a comfy chair and have removed all choking hazards from your mouth. This article is taking AIDS as its main example of an emergent disease having a major impact on international security considerations. Fair enough. But there isn't a single reference to a source later than about 2000. Most of the citations, in fact, go back to the early or mid-90s. We shouldn't judge too harshly. It's probably another one of those areas of "cultural difference". A society as ancient as China perhaps doesn't revere being up-to-date as highly as we do in the West.