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Posted on 04/22/2003 12:17:59 PM PDT by Enemy Of The State

SARS: Beijing's lesson may be too late
By Phar Kim Beng

HONG KONG - With the admission on Sunday by China that the number of cases in Beijing was 10 times what it had reported recently, followed by the admission of 109 new cases on Monday, China's fight to stop severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) has now belatedly shifted into top gear.

Gao Qiang, deputy health minister, said at a news conference on Sunday: "With such a situation, with more than 300 patients in Beijing, the situation is already very serious." Gao added that there were 400 more suspected cases in the capital.

Health Minister Zhang Wenkang and Beijing Mayor Meng Xuenong were summarily removed from their party posts. The Chinese government has also canceled the week-long vacation that begins on Labor Day, May 1. This is to prevent the massive movement of holiday revelers.

Domestic travelers in China have to fill in declarations before they board any planes. With these moves, the radius and vector of SARS will, it is hoped, be minimized while scientists toil to find an effective vaccine. Such measures have come after sustained pressure from the international community, including the World Health Organization (WHO), for China to come clean about the true extent of SARS on the mainland.

While the gestures may well be too little too late to contain SARS, they are a marked shift away from the blanket of denial that had prevailed in China since last November, when the first case was reported in Guangdong province.

To be sure, since its opening up to the world in 1979, China has not learned how to be transparent nor share domestic information with the rest of the world. To this date, scholars and analysts specializing in China, for instance, continue to doubt the veracity of its economic growth statistics. If anything, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has had a perennial problem with creating an environment with a flow of information similar to that of developed countries.

During the Great Leap Forward (1958-60), an industrialization campaign launched by Chairman Mao Zedong to supersede the gross domestic products (GDPs) of the United States and United Kingdom in 15 and 10 years respectively, there were widespread efforts by the lower cadres to exaggerate the production of steel and wheat. The systemic misreporting resulted in skewed production numbers at all levels.

Indeed, lower officials found themselves unable to report on the inability of the various provinces to meet the steel and wheat output. Caught in the fear and revolutionary fervor of the time, they also resorted to doctoring their reports to present a glowing picture to the leadership in Beijing.

Serious statistical deception hoodwinked Beijing into believing that the campaign was making progress when in fact a famine of great proportion was taking place. Tragically, this eventually led to the death of some 30 million Chinese as maldistribution, and central planning based upon non-existent harvests, significantly aggravated the food supply through out the country. To this date, the Great Leap Forward remains the biggest human disaster ever.

During the Cultural Revolution that rampaged from 1966-76, a culture of pernicious misinformation also prevailed. Officials and intellectuals were targeted for various forms of abuses by the marauding mob on the flimsiest of information. A person could be attacked for merely having a violin, a status symbol apparently reflecting the individual's Western background.

Nevertheless, having become a member of the World Trade Organization (WTO) in late 2001, China is only slowly becoming aware of the importance of transparency. Partly, this is due to the need to emulate the "best practice" of the leading countries in order to keep China within an earshot of other great powers.

Political scientist Kenneth Waltz argues that states are socialized into the international system because they will be injured or even destroyed if they fail to adapt to it. In the context of globalization, therefore, this implies that China can only make significant progress if it adopts the international norms. Barring this action, Beijing would risk being left behind. In the case of SARS, failure to conform to the standards agreed by WHO may lead China to being marginalized.

Nevertheless, while most states can indeed be absorbed into the international system, their absorption is often slow and sometimes minimal because states widely fail to evaluate their policies or thought paradigms.

As Stephen Van Evera at Massachusetts Institute Technology explained: "Failure to self-evaluate impedes national learning and allows misperception to flourish. Myths, false propaganda, and anachronistic beliefs persist in the absence of strong evaluative institutions to test ideas against logic and evidence, weeding out those that fail. As a result, national learning is slow and forgetting is quick. The external environment is perceived only dimly, through a fog of myths and misperceptions."

Hence, a free press and a vibrant civil society, composed partly of a large system of free universities, are crucial to ensuring effective self-evaluation. Scholars and thinkers that are part of these evaluative mechanisms should also have an evaluative ethos: a sense that their duties include evaluating important official or popular beliefs. In China, this has been evidently lacking, allowing government officials literally to get away with murder.

Furthermore, the political economy of China has gradually oriented itself toward tourism since its economic liberalization. Private analysts believe that some 6 percent of China's GDP is now reliant on tourism. This is a rate that is similar to countries in Southeast Asia such as Malaysia, Thailand, Indonesia and Singapore.

Hence, there was every reason to withhold information on SARS when the first outbreak occurred. This was to avoid the flow of tourists from coming to a complete halt. Indeed, official attention on SARS only began to take on certain urgency after February, the month marking the celebration of the Lunar New Year, and traditionally a month when tourists come to mainland China in large numbers from Hong Kong, Taiwan and the overseas Chinese communities in Southeast Asia.

Now that China has taken SARS more seriously, one can only hope that the damage will be minimal. If SARS continues to rage throughout the mainland, as in Guangdong and Hong Kong, then the leadership in Beijing will live to regret its slow disclosure and poor handling of SARS. It will not only be the proverbial heads of the health minister and mayor rolling on the floor, but those of the Fourth Generation leaders currently led by President Hu Jintao.

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