What Buddha?

At an awesome 153 m tall, the bronze buddha recently unveiled in central China's Henan province seemed destined to become a rare tourist attraction in a place better known for its burgeoning AIDS problem. Yet when thousands of people tried attending the buddha's dedication ceremony last year, police shooed them away. And when the Henan Economic Experiment newspaper mentioned the statue in March, the edition was yanked from newsstands by provincial officials. The journalist who wrote the story was fired the following day, along with his editor. To date, no other mention of the buddha has appeared in the mainland press. The attraction is now closed to the public; tour buses with potential visitors are turned back by harried guards.

Why is the giant monument's birth being greeted with this distinctly un-Buddhist-like anti-p.r. campaign? Local reporters, who obtained access to internal provincial documents, say the statue was built with the approval of Li Changchun, who was Henan's Communist Party secretary in the 1990s before taking up his present post in 2003 as the Party's national propaganda chief. Li presided over Henan precisely when the local government was turning a blind eye to peasants contracting HIV by selling their blood, which was collected with tainted equipment. When the scandal was exposed four years ago, Li may have realized that his earlier decision to sign off on a $24 million buddha when many of the province's rural inhabitants were so poor they resorted to selling their own blood might make for bad press. And as the country's propaganda chief he had the power to order a nationwide news blackout. Today, the only real movement in and out of the shuttered complex is that of the resident abbot—a friend of Li's, according to local guide Fu Rongguang—who drives around the countryside in a chauffeured black Cadillac. To the rest of the world, the buddha might as well not exist—except that it can be plainly seen from miles away.