Who should kneel before whom?

Who should kneel, the woman or the environmental protection bureau director and local leader?

A woman, with a bottle containing water from a heavily polluted local river, went down on her knees before the director of the Huai'an environmental protection bureau in a program televised live by the local television station on Friday, beseeching the local government of the city in East China's Jiangsu province to clean up a heavily polluted river.

Instead of feeling humiliated, the director shamelessly said that his bureau was not authoritative and powerful enough to do anything about the polluted river. And he suggested that local residents should try hard to have their voices heard by higher-level authorities so that something is done to clean up the river. What the local district leader said about the issue is even more absurd: He said that he did not know about the pollution.