Journalists, experts discuss China's response to H7N9 outbreak

In a conversation in the ChinaFile blog, David Wertime, co-founder and co-editor of Tea Leaf Nation, an English-language online magazine that analyzes Chinese social media, speaks with Yanzhong Huang, a senior fellow for global health at the Council on Foreign Relations; journalist Isabel Hilton; Donald Clarke, a professor at the George Washington University Law School in Washington, D.C.; Susan Jakes, editor of ChinaFile; Dorinda Elliott, editor at large at ChinaFile; and James Fallows, a correspondent for The Atlantic, about the emergence of a new strain of avian flu called H7N9 in China and the country's response to the outbreak so far. "Predicting whether infection will spread to the extremes required of the term 'pandemic' is a fool's errand," but "there's no question the H7N9 outbreak will test whether the administration of new president Xi Jinping is serious about its calls for greater transparency," the blog states (4/3).