By Shai Oster
Of THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
BEIJING (Dow Jones)--China announced Monday it had reached an agreement with Mexico on repatriating nationals aboard specially chartered flights, a day after Mexican officials sharply criticized China's rounding up and quarantining scores of Mexicans when only one has been confirmed with the A/H1N1 flu.
China's Ministry of Foreign Affairs said in a statement on its Web site Monday the two countries had reached an agreement on returning nationals home and were working out the details of the flights.
(This story and related background material will be available on The Wall Street Journal Web site, WSJ.com.)
More than 70 Mexicans are in isolation around China, according to Mexican officials, and that number is rising. China has been rounding up all travelers aboard an AeroMexico flight that arrived Thursday in Shanghai from Mexico with a 25-year-old Mexican man, who is now ill with human swine flu in Hong Kong. He is the only known Mexican sufferer in China to date. However, Mexicans on other flights say they have been singled out for harsh treatment - drawing a sharp rebuke from Mexican officials.
Meanwhile, Chinese tourists and others in Mexico have been trying to get back home too, but some flights have been canceled.
The diplomatic row brewing underscores how China may have improved its public health safety system from earlier in the decade when it bungled several outbreaks, but shows how it still has much to learn on international bedside manners.
On Sunday, Mexico's foreign minister said Mexican nationals were being held in ""unacceptable conditions." On Monday, China's foreign ministry responded to the allegations. "The measures are non-discriminative and not targeted at Mexican citizens. This is simply a hygienic inspection issue," ministry spokesperson Ma Zhaoxu said, according to the transcript of an interview posted on the ministry's Web site.
It was unclear from the statement when the planes would be arriving. Mexican embassy officials had told people quarantined in a hotel in Beijing that a plane would be arriving as early as Tuesday. But one passenger in quarantine said that Chinese officials had told them that they might be released Wednesday.
Ministry of Health officials did not immediately reply to requests for comment.
"I don't condemn their concern to control this outbreak, I'm very sensitive to the SARS problem they had a few years ago," said Carlos Doormann, AeroMexico's finance director who is among those being held in a hotel in Beijing's outskirts where he was taken after arriving on the flight from Mexico Saturday. He was moved to the hotel along with his three young children and wife after first being taken to a hospital for infectious diseases.
"I can understand that, but I cannot understand how they can violate international treaties and all that. It's hard to understand what has been happening. What is their intention for having us here for seven days?" he said.
He said that embassy officials were ferrying Western food and toys for the children, and that embassy officials had been able to communicate with the stranded passengers.
China's handling of epidemics has been bumpy in the past, and the nation's close living quarters, primitive health-care network and vast population of hundreds of millions of migrant workers leave it extremely vulnerable to an epidemic outbreak.
In 2003, China went from at first denying the existence of the Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome, or SARS, to suddenly quarantining thousands as it fought to contain the outbreak.
-By Shai Oster, The Wall Street Journal; 86-10-6588-5848; shai.oster@wsj.com
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(END) Dow Jones Newswires
May 04, 2009 08:02 ET (12:02 GMT) | 
