Mark Twain once said: "Everybody talks about the weather, but nobody does anything about it." Well that's not quite the case in communist China. No sir.
The authorities here have devised a method of dealing with weather extremes. If the people think it's too hot, they simply say it's not so.
Take the recent heat wave, when Beijing turned into a sauna with the thermometer hitting 40C (105F) on several days in a row. On one steamy, choking afternoon it touched 42.2C, the highest in 50 years.
However, during this hot spell, the People's Daily, the official Communist Party bible, told its readers, day after day, in the weather box on top of its front page, that the maximum temperature was no higher than 32C. F).
Now, Beijingers think nothing of 32C. That's normal for the summer months. If it was a mere 32 C there wouldn't be 300 Beijing traffic policemen in hospital for dehydration, or more old people than ever before dying of heat stroke, or electricity blackouts three times as frequent as last year because of air conditioners overloading the system.
Also domestic thermometers would not be registering in the mid-40s, though anyone who glanced up at the big public thermometer in red electronic lights on top of the Guiyou Department Store on Jianguomenwai Avenue would have noted that it was mysteriously switched off and could not therefore contradict the party organ.
But at the height of the heat wave, something curious happened. Those readers who still bothered to check the mendacious weather box in the People's Daily saw on July 24th that it was forecasting a temperature of 40C. It boasted moreover that this was the first time in the history of Beijing meteorology that such a high figure had been released.
Note the word "released". It was seized upon by a reporter, Zheng Zhi, in the Beijing Youth Daily. "Doesn't this mean that such figures had been recorded before, but not released?" he asked, concluding, correctly as it turned out, that they had. The writer took this as his cue to launch into a rare attack on official evasiveness.
"We know that it's very hot but we don't know how high the temperature is," he fumed. "We know the sky is not blue and the water is not green but we don't know the source or index of pollution; we know that corruption exists but we don't know how many corrupt officials are punished and the amounts involved. Lots of figures concerning the national economy and people's lives haven't ever been released to the public."
Appealing for more transparency and objective news reporting, he recalled Chairman Mao's widely-ignored 1941 dictum: "Seek truth from facts." Otherwise, he warned, people would cease believing official news.
Emboldened by the official cave-in, his newspaper, published by the Communist Party's youth league, then did its own survey of temperatures around the city and published them in a full page spread. It turned out that the average temperature on that day in Beijing streets was 44C.
The episode of the corrected temperature figures is a small step for weather forecasting in China, and (maybe) a giant leap forward in publishing accurate statistics in a notoriously secretive country.
But why would the Chinese authorities want to deceive the masses over how hot it was in the first place?
Perhaps the government was just following the old Chinese habit of concealing any news that might reveal weaknesses to foreigners. Maybe in the absence of accountability, it automatically put a spin on everything, even the weather, especially as the quality of urban life has been steadily deteriorating through the combination of pollution and excessive heat.
More likely the real reason lay in the official desire not to let productivity slacken in the Chinese economy. In past years the maximum temperature in heat-stricken Chinese cities has never officially exceeded 37C. This, as any Beijing taxi driver will tell you, is the point above which construction workers and labourers are entitled to down tools and go home. There is no record of workers ever getting such a privilege.
And the day the authorities did come clean was, to no one's surprise, a Saturday, when people had stopped work for the weekend. Officials, of course, now say the "day off" rule never existed.
At least Beijing's bureaucrats have now conceded that one cannot dictate to barometers. Or as the poet Louis MacNeice put it, in another context: "The glass is falling hour by hour, the glass will fall forever. But if you break the bloody glass you won't hold up the weather."