Even in a China that is more capitalist than ever, the instinctive official response to bad news is to suppress it with all the force available to the nominally communist state. Beijing needs to accept that in 2007 this kind of reaction is as futile and dangerous as it was in 2003, when the authorities kept secret the spread of the deadly Sars virus. It is futile because the truth will out and dangerous because secrecy delays the necessary remedial action.

So it is with the bowdlerising of a World Bank report on pollution in China. As the Financial Times has reported, the original research found that more than 750,000 Chinese die prematurely each year, mainly from air pollution.