International Herald Tribune: SARS exposes China's fragility

The New York Times

Friday, May 23, 2003

SHANGHAI -- As China begins to bring the SARS epidemic under control, the Communist Party is seeking to claim credit for defusing a crisis caused partly by official denial and deceit.

The leading government news media have hailed the fight against SARS as a "baptism" that gave rise to a new sense of unity around the country.

"This smokeless war has been a classroom in which we have felt and forged a national spirit," China Youth Daily said in an editorial this week.

But some scholars and media commentators say SARS did more to expose the weaknesses of China's political culture than the strengths.

They say the panicked reaction of people around the country, the chaotic flight of migrant workers from Beijing and other big cities, and the tendency to rely almost exclusively on the central government to fight SARS exposed the fragility of China's social order.

"This war against SARS has been totally dominated by the government," said Xu Jilin, a history scholar at East China Normal University here. "If a society faced with a crisis can only passively depend on government control, this in itself represents a latent crisis."

The free debate about the government's handling of SARS, unusual in a society that generally discourages open discussion of sensitive topics in an emergency, is occurring as anxiety about the disease has begun to ease.

Beijing high schools opened Thursday for the first time since April 22, shortly after the authorities acknowledged concealing the extent of SARS. Elementary schools are expected to reopen in mid-June.

In mainland China, 5,272 people have been infected with severe acute respiratory syndrome and 300 have died, the World Health Organization said Friday.

Chinese officials are expressing confidence that the worst is over and that the disease may abate soon.

The returning sense of normalcy has prompted scholars to present a variety of assessments in the official news media and popular online discussion forums. While many agree that the government deserves credit for limiting the spread of SARS, even some government-backed media commentators say the effort should not be viewed as a clear victory for the party-led system.

China Economic Times ran a front-page commentary on Thursday emphasizing the authorities' errors in combating SARS, including "delaying, hiding and preventing exposure in the press - habitual behavior under this system."

Referring to the firing of the health minister and the mayor of Beijing in late April, the article said, "Only when two senior officials were dismissed was there a turn for the better."

At issue for other critics is the revival of the Communist Party's old-fashioned apparatus of control. Neighborhood committees, work units and village-level governments have been empowered to isolate travelers from SARS-infected areas, enforce quarantines on people suspected of contact with SARS patients and tutor people on how to practice good hygiene.

Though such party structures have at times been mobilized amid political unrest, such activity largely ended with the rapid growth of China's market economy in recent years.

The propaganda machine has also been operating in overdrive. Television news is full of maudlin homages to health workers. President Hu Jintao invoked the need for a "people's war" against the disease, a term that refers to the peasant-led uprising that helped bring the Communists to power more than 50 years ago.

While some critics say the campaign has had positive effects, they say it also undermines efforts to make people take more responsibility for themselves and their communities.

In the SARS crisis, the government and the party have been issuing orders on details like how hospitals should charge patients in rural areas who seek SARS treatment.

Individuals and communities should be able to handle such matters without an official script, many say, arguing that individuals will never take initiative if the party keeps asserting its primacy.

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