Abstract
Just after Chinese New Year in 2011, as Beijing was slowly returning to work following the month-long holiday, I found Vincent Martin in the Emergency Center, sharp lines of frustration already beginning to crease the tan acquired during a beach vacation in Thailand. He had returned from Phuket to a regional outbreak of foot-and-mouth disease that, he explained, China had so far refused to report. I turned the conversation toward influenza, and Martin kept on the theme of China’s lack of “transparency.” He complained that for over a year not a single avian influenza outbreak had been reported by the