Leave food, oil prices to markets

Publishing negative news can have a positive social effect. China has learned plenty of lessons about that in the last few years. Reports on the outbreak of SARS (severely acute respiratory syndrome) in 2003, and at the moment, on the spread of the hand-foot-mouth disease, caused by the virus EV71, are cases in point.

Just as in the latter case, when a nationwide coordination began over the weekend to combat a children's disease, little known earlier and never considered so dangerous, things that need to be done require a whole nation's support. These cannot be done by just a few officials when they are afraid to lose face, or even when they assume that somehow they can still manage things by themselves.

But little has been said about how the nation is going to deal with the inflation that is facing the entire world. For quite some time, the country has been trying to keep the fuel price lower than in the global market. But in order to prevent fuel smuggling, it has to keep the supply to its southern coast, cities on the Pearl River Delta, at only a minimum level.