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Beijing loses big on SARS
gamble
By Francesco Sisci
BEIJING - As can be easily gleaned from history,
wars are certainly terrible, but epidemics can be worse.
This has not been the case in China, where large
pandemics have been limited because of dissemination of
knowledge to the public and good health care. The story
was different in Europe, where the Black Death killed an
estimated 23 million people, a result far worse than any
of the wars of those times.
China in the past
months seems to have forgotten history's lesson as it
weighed the pros and cons of releasing information about
the new disease frightening people worldwide, severe
acute respiratory syndrome (SARS).
In last
Thursday's Washington Post, John Pomfret reported:
"Chinese officials have not exhibited any regrets about
the way they have dealt with the outbreak. In a
closed-door meeting with senior editors early last week,
Lei Yulan, a deputy governor of Guangdong province,
dismissed the open information policy of other countries
and Hong Kong, just over the border.
"'You can
see how much trouble the Hong Kong government created
for itself after it made everything public,' she said,
according to a participant at the meeting. 'They didn't
have the ability to control and handle the disease, so
what good was it to make everything public? Their
tourism and investment are affected. Most of all, their
people are in chaos. What a great loss.'"
If the
story is true, it explains in black and white the
attitude of many cadres toward the disease, and reveals
their ignorance of the basic rules of the globalization
era, the rules that have fueled China's economic growth
in the past decades.
Foreign capital has been
pouring into China over the past couple of decades, due
in large part to the slow and painstaking
public-relations job done by Chinese and foreigners.
They have convinced the world that China is dependable,
trustworthy and able to produce good returns - returns
higher than many other popular investment destinations.
China has profited from this image transformation.
Businessmen, cynically put, can tolerate many
things in an investment destination - incarceration of
dissenters, a repressive political environment, brutal
police-state tactics - all things that are frequently
conducive to good returns. But investors certainly
cannot stand a threat to their own safety, or that of
their investments, which SARS poses. Suppression of
information on SARS has created an environment in which
investors and businessmen who frequently travel to China
feel their investments and their lives threatened.
In this highly connected world, suppression of
information about a disease such as SARS is impossible
because infected people will sooner or later end up in a
country with a comparatively freer press, which will
start investigating the source of the illness.
This new pneumonia raises the same fears we have
experienced with AIDS. It is new, it has no vaccine and
it is has killed just under 100 people to date. It
spreads rapidly, apparently through sneezing and
coughing, although there may be other modes of
transmission as well. The lack of reliable information
regarding SARS, and the ease of its spread, are
disturbingly reminiscent of the Black Death, the disease
that still haunts the Western world centuries after its
peak.
The apparent Chinese fear of fully
disclosing information regarding SARS, which is believed
by the World Health Organization (WHO) to have
originated in Foshan, Guangdong, and the rapid spread of
cases all over the world has seriously undermined
Beijing's credibility. The ramifications of this loss of
credibility will be great. This will hit the Chinese
economy, not only because businessmen will be scared to
go to Guangdong, but because there will be a suspicion
that if Beijing has the gall to attempt an obviously
futile coverup of this nature, it might as well lie on
other issues that are more easily concealed. It will
take at least several months to recover the credibility
that China's official and unofficial PR people required
years to build. Investment and trust in China could take
a plunge in the next few months. The plunge will be even
more severe if the the world experiences an economic
recovery that offers other viable investment venues with
more open governments.
The gravity of this
situation prompted the face-conscious Chinese government
to issue an unprecedented open apology to the world last
Thursday. "Today, we apologize to everyone," said Li
Liming, director of China's Center for Disease Control.
"Our medical departments and our mass media suffered
poor coordination. We weren't able to muster our forces
in helping to provide everyone with scientific publicity
and allowing the masses to get hold of this sort of
knowledge."
On the political front, for the past
two weeks anti-Beijing forces in Taiwan have blamed
Chinese authorities for covering up the disease and thus
significantly contributing to the spread of SARS.
Beijing in effect gave Taipei a free political weapon
via its silence regarding SARS' spread.
This
gross political miscalculation was certainly affected to
an extent by the recent power transition in Beijing. The
first cases of SARS were spotted in November, when the
party was holding its 16th Congress to select its
"Fourth Generation" of upper-echelon leaders. Last
month, when the disease was exploding in Hong Kong, the
National People's Congress was being held in Beijing,
where China's first peaceful transition of power was
formalized. In these months the leaders didn't have the
time or willingness to consider carefully the importance
of all that was occurring regarding the outbreaks of
SARS.
The decision should have been easy for
Beijing. As soon as WHO asked to be allowed to
investigate the disease, it should have been invited in
and given full access to affected areas, Guangdong in
particular. It also should have been allowed to speak
freely to the world (and Chinese) press regarding SARS.
This would have undoubtedly buttressed China's
previously growing credibility as a responsible member
of the global community.
But China's domestic
rules regarding epidemics say that information can be
publicly released only after prior authorization from
above. And the leaders were too focused on their
political chores to worry about WHO's request to
investigate an illness in Guangdong, which is far from
Beijing. For sensitive issues such as a potential
epidemic, image-conscious Chinese leaders need
consensus. The Chinese political system has virtually no
provisions for health officials to speak out without
being censored by the state-run press or receiving
direct punishment from Beijing. If an official chooses
to speak out as an individual on a delicate matter like
SARS, one usually kills their political career and risks
imprisonment. In fact even if the decision proves right,
one's political enemies could attack the official for
betraying party unity, which is viewed in Beijing as the
crux of national stability.
Therefore SARS has
illuminated, for all the world to see, a major flaw in
the Chinese political system. That system still awaits
the massive overhaul that the economy has received. The
main culprit in China's SARS blunder is the lack of
political reform, which should have accompanied China's
rapid economic transformation. China's economy might
well not survive a second epidemic. If its economy
collapses, the political system will likely follow.
(©2003 Asia Times Online Co, Ltd. All rights
reserved. Please contact content@atimes.com
for information on our sales and syndication policies.)
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