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China looking for SARS' silver
lining
By Shiping Tang
BEIJING - The talk in Beijing now is: US Defense
Secretary Donald Rumsfeld's "shock and awe" strategy in
Iraq with smart bombs is nothing compared with the shock
and awe by the "smart virus" known as SARS.
For
the past half-year, severe acute respiratory syndrome,
which began in the coastal province of Guangdong, has
swept into inland China and across the globe. While at
first China tried to restrict spread of the disease
without public warning, things quickly got out of
control. When people in Hong Kong, Singapore, and
Vietnam began to get infected by the virus, SARS became
a bona fide domestic and international crisis for the
new Chinese leadership, unseen since the 1997 Asian
financial crisis.
Like the 1997 crisis, the SARS
crisis also struck at a seemingly improbable time. In
1997, East Asian countries were basking in the glory of
the regional economic miracle and looking forward to
another decade of robust economic growth. Likewise,
China was also in a great mood before SARS struck.
Indeed, just before the "official" outbreak of
SARS, the Chinese Communist Party concluded its 16th
congress, and a new group of leaders took the reins in
Beijing. Economic growth in the first quarter was more
robust than most economists predicted. International
trade was booming, and foreign direct investment (FDI)
continued to arrive. China was looking forward to the
next 20 years as the window of strategic importance for
China's development into an economic powerhouse. In all,
everything seemed to be going well for China.
Things are quite different now, and this may be
but the beginning.
China came out of the 1997
crisis in a much stronger position. By upholding the
value of its currency, China earned toasts from its
neighboring countries, the United States, Europe, and
the International Monetary Fund (IMF) as the "bulwark of
stability", and shored up its image as a "responsible
great power". After the crisis, China became the new FDI
hotbed, pulling money from all over the world.
This time, however, China risks going back to
its pre-1997-crisis status.
SARS has already
struck China's foreign trade and tourism, which now
contribute significantly to the country's total gross
domestic product (GDP). The economic growth rate this
year is unlikely to reach the 8 percent predicted at the
beginning of this year. Indeed, the World Bank has
already lowered its forecast for China's GDP growth rate
from 8 percent to 7.5 percent, and it may go even lower
if the SARS crisis cannot be contained with the first
half-year (barely two months left).
Second,
China's image of "responsible great power" is in
jeopardy. Regional countries are complaining that China
did not alert them earlier so that they could have taken
precautionary measures, and editorials and opinions from
these countries are lashing out that China cannot be a
responsible great power and does not know how to behave
like one because Beijing has yet to grasp that China's
policies will have far greater consequence in the age of
globalization.
Third and most important, the
crisis underscores the fact that the country's crisis
management system remains extremely inadequate and
ineffective. This ineffectiveness is caused not only by
the lack of a basic infrastructure but, perhaps more
important, by a lack of openness that is absolutely
necessary for handling this kind of crisis in these
ever-connected times.
China's crisis-management
experience largely came from its heroic struggle against
the great Yangtze flood in 1998. With sheer
determination and manpower, the country was able to beat
back the flood. But to handle the SARS crisis, sheer
manpower is simply not the answer. It requires
integrated work of experts and organizations, not
soldiers, workers, and peasants. Most important, it
requires an open and transparent government.
All
these factors are prompting a serious re-examination of
how China should be governed and what role the media
should play. With proper attitude and action, China can
still come out of the crisis in a much stronger
position, just as it did after the 1997
crisis.
First, as recent directives from the
Politburo indicated, much more openness in the media
will likely emerge. While the new openness will not lead
to freedom to criticize the Party or the central
government, it would give less power to local officials
to silence local and national media outlets from
exposing indifference and ineffectiveness in facing this
crisis and those still to come. The media will remain
the voice of the Party (and therefore the state), but
they will also become the eyes of the Party.
Second, the crisis may also lead to a new set of
rules for appraising local officials' performance, which
is now largely based on how they produce good economic
growth numbers. Most local officials, believing they
will get promoted only if they present good news instead
of bad news, have great incentive to hide a budding
crisis and disaster from the public and the central
government. This was evident long before the SARS
crisis. Local officials and governments routinely tried
to hide such incidents as coal-mine explosions and food
poisoning that killed scores of people from the pubic
and the central authority by silencing the local media
and refusing to let national media on to the scene. The
central government now understands that local officials
and governments' horrendous disregard of human life is
fundamentally undermining people's trust in the
government.
Therefore, if the new leadership
does learn the right lesson from the SARS crisis, you
may see far more bad news coming from China than ever
before. But that should not be a reason not to go to or
invest in China. Rather, it should be welcomed as a sign
that China is truly becoming a more open and civilized
society. And only a government that is responsible for
its people will be a truly responsible great power.
From this angle, there may be a silver lining to
the SARS crisis. As the Chinese characters for crisis
suggest, a crisis is both a challenge and an
opportunity.
Shiping Tang is deputy
director of the Center for Regional Security Studies,
Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, Beijing. He is also
a co-director of the Sino-American Security Dialogue.
The opinions expressed here are his personal views.
(©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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