The art of crisis management

For a country that has had its fair share of crises, managing those crises seems every time like it has to learn the trade from the start. The combination of the annual transport crisis of the Lunar New Year and a freak winter causes amazing scenes, writes also Howard French in the International Herald Tribune.
Finding out there is actually a crisis emerging (remember SARS) is already a weak point:

The real scandal of China's weather emergency is that it had been going on for weeks, largely uncovered and not treated as an emergency for most of that time. That is because the heavy snows that have been accumulating in central China were falling on places far out of the spotlight.

As in the case of SARS the central government stepped in too late, and probably also with too little. An apologizing premier Wen Jiabao might add to the propaganda spiel the crisis has inevitable become, but it could have been done so much better.