While you were out...someone blew himself up in your city

So remember the new year? That was way back at the end of January, when 1.4 billion people set off firecrackers and fireworks like it was going outta style, and the country erupted in an earsplitting but benign blizzard of explosions and mixed metaphors. For weeks on end, it sounded as though we were in the middle of a bullet-riddled war zone.

Eventually, the ignorant and explosion-shy waiguoren gets used to it, laughs it off, stops jumping every time she hears the noise and becomes accustomed to the gunpowder constantly hanging in the air. Rah.

Then, a while after returning to Shanghai from Henan via some other places, I find this.

A man triggered an explosion, possibly by blowing himself up, up on New Year's Eve--Jan. 25--outside the Public Security Bureau's Jin'an neighbourhood headquarters. No one was hurt. A man-hunt us underway in Hunan, where the bomber is believed to have been from.

What freaks me out about this is not so much the bombing itself, although to be honest I find it moderately scary.

But what genuinely, truly freaks me right the fuck out is that this wasn't. reported. anywhere.

I admit, my Chinese-reading skillz are, um, crappy at best. So it's possible it's run in a bunch of Chinese-language papers I haven't been able to find. But according to the WSJ blog post, it appeared briefly in a Changsha paper and was then taken down. Now, no one will talk about it.

What the hell?

A friend of mine, who is Chinese and one of the most well-informed people I know, had never heard about this. She says that's not uncommon, however: "Maybe it's just a stereotype, [but] it seems that I've heard a lot of unbelievable news that 'the government' tries to hide," she said.

It's true China's government kinda sorta has some public-disclosure issues. But gone are the days when something truly catastrophic could happen--say, millions of people starving to death--without anybody knowing about it.

...right?