CMP fellow Hu Yong (胡泳) argues in an editorial in today’s Southern Metropolis Daily that the government should speed-up its response to public crises and sudden-breaking incidents.
The editorial begins:
Public crises, or sudden-breaking social incidents, are common rather than rare occurrences in a China fraught with tensions and contradictions. We have seen far too many examples in recent years, and these were not so much cases in which the situation itself was explosive, but rather cases where slowness of government response created substantial problems and difficulties.
Not long ago, People’s Daily Online’s Public Opinion Testing Center (人民网舆情监测室) raised the principal of a “golden four hours” (黄金4小时) in dealing with sudden-breaking events, and this was clear-sighted in terms of time frames in dealing with crisis management . . .
