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| Subject | LEADERSHIP How to Fail The People |
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LEADERSHIP
How to Fail The People
The new leaders promised better, but did worse than their elders in their first big crisis. In this fiasco, the economy and the well-being of foreigners seem more important than public health
By Susan V. Lawrence/BEIJING
Issue cover-dated April 24, 2003
CHINA'S LEADER Hu Jintao finally spoke up about Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome, or Sars. Five months after China recorded the world's first known case and nearly two months after a doctor from the city of Guangzhou is believed to have carried Sars to Hong Kong, Hu told the territory's Chief Executive Tung Chee-hwa in Shenzhen that "the central government attached great importance to the well-being and health of the people in Hong Kong."
On the same day, April 12, Premier Wen Jiabao for the first time visited a Beijing hospital treating Sars patients. Wearing no protective clothing, Wen shook hands with medical staff and urged them to take a "highly responsible" attitude to the public's health. The day after that, he chaired an extraordinary national meeting on the disease. His instructions: China must take "resolute measures" to stem the spread of the epidemic, improve cooperation with the World Health Organization (WHO) and Hong Kong, and keep the world informed about its efforts to treat and prevent Sars.
China's leaders seemed at last to be coming to terms with the scale of the challenge that Sars poses to their reputations, the economy and Hong Kong. The wonder is that it took them so long.
Though they had held senior party jobs for years, when they took top party positions in November and state posts in March, China's leaders styled themselves as a subtly different new breed. They would be more attuned to the concerns of ordinary people. Their decision-making would be more participatory. Their state-controlled media would report bad news in a timely fashion. They seemed to have politicians' instincts and a flair for image-making. Setting the tone, state television showed Hu visiting herders in Inner Mongolia and Wen carrying Lunar New Year wishes to coal-miners.
Sars, though, was the new administration's first major test, and it wrecked much of that image. Only reluctantly did the government give statistics on the infected and dead. It still refuses to disclose the number of suspected cases. State media played down Sars for months, reassuring the public the outbreak was under control, even when it wasn't. The authorities didn't publicize how people could protect themselves from Sars until four-and-a-half months after the epidemic's start. And when Hu expressed concern for Hong Kong's citizens, he still hadn't done the same for Guangdong province, which suffered even more infections. He voiced his worries for Guangdong the next day.
The belated decision to give full attention to Sars appears to have less to do with public health than with concerns about the harm that adverse international perceptions of China's handling of the disease would do to the economy and the country's reputation. Privately and at times publicly, officials say they think the disease has been blown out of proportion. The noon television news on April 10 was telling. It followed a story giving the latest total of Sars deaths in China--60--with a story on the number of people killed on Chinese roads in the first quarter of the year--25,395. Long Yongtu, Chinna's former chief trade negotiator, scoffed to a Hong Kong conference in late March that the 300 people then infected in the territory "compr! ise only a very small proportion of Hong Kong's population of 6 million." Local media coverage of the Sars outbreak was "biased," he charged, and had unnecessarily "created anxiety among members of the public."
But on April 13, Wen said a "temporary impact" on China's tourism, travel, commerce, and international exchanges would be "difficult to avoid." To restore international confidence, he required officials to "be concerned with the issue of protecting the health of foreigners in China." He also ordered them to proactively protect the health of those attending international events in China.
It was a striking U-turn for the leadership under concerted and prolonged international pressure. From a domestic public-relations perspective, however, the leadership's message still seems off-key. In an April 10 press conference in Beijing, Vice-Minister of Health Ma Xiaowei said the city had "designated some hospitals with relatively good conditions, that are relatively strong technically, to provide medical services to foreign patients." It was putting together a group of top-notch medical professionals to treat foreigners in Beijing, he said, and would be briefing the foreign community regularly. Yet all that begged the question of whether China was more concerned about the health of foreigners than its own citizens. China's citizen! s had ample opportunity to mull that question because the news conference was broadcast on national television and the Xinhua news agency released a transcript.
To reassure the foreign community, China finally invited the WHO to review the way health authorities in Beijing are working to contain the disease. The move was an acknowledgement that China's obfuscation so far had cost it credibility. It also signalled an important recognition that international organizations--other than the World Trade Organization--have a legitimate role in domestic affairs, challenging traditional Chinese ideas oof sovereignty.
With the media suddenly full of directives on Sars, Beijing is now providing its citizens with vastly more information about the disease than it has ever given about another public-health challenge--Aids. At least a million Chinese are estimated to be infected with the virus that causes Aids, compared to 1,418 with the Saars virus. Yet no Chinese leader has visited doctors treating Aids patients. No premier is known to have chaired a national meeting on Aids prevention. And China has yet to mobilize its vast propaganda resources to spread information about how to stop Aids. The difference: Aids never made the international community call off conferences in China, downgrade growth forecasts for China, cancel tourist bookings and ban visito! rs from China.
A once larger-than-life public figure remained silent: former President Jiang Zemin. He gave up the top official protocol rank to Hu in March, when he handed over the presidency. But Jiang's rank only dropped to No. 2 and he remains chairman of China's Central Military Commission. That job has particular relevance for the battle against Sars because it puts Jiang in charge of an extensive military medical establishment that exists in parallel to the state medical establishment. People's Liberation Army hospitals are at the forefront of treating Sars patients.
Yet military hospital staff say they are unaware of Jiang having issued any directives on handling Sars. Instructions came belatedly from a lower level--the General Logistics Department of the military. Jiang's low Sars profile helps fill in the picture of what role he plays iin China. He has ceded responsibility for day-to-day affairs to Hu, according to officials. Sars, they say, is not enough of a crisis to merit his intervention. Jiang is focused instead on drawing lessons for China from the Iraq war and devising strategies for defusing the crisis over North Korea, they say.
So what happens next time? Having paid a price for mishandling Sars, will China's leaders deal with their next crisis any better? Du Gangjian, a professor of public administration at the Beijing-based National School of Administration, the premier training ground for state officials in China, sees a host of lessons for the leadership in its flawed early response to Sars. It shows, he says, that the authorities need to work on better defining government responsibilities, as well as on crisis management, mechanisms to improve the flow of information within the government, and systems for ensuring that the government is "open and transparent in a timely way with information that affects public safety." China has made strides toward open gov! ernment in the past five years, he says, but mainly at township and county levels. "Now it looks as if we need to step up the pace of open government at the level of provinces, and ministries and commissions," Du says.
Ultimately, Du says, the problem with the leadership's Sars response boils down to a question of the public's "right to know." He thinks he sees the start of an acknowledgement of that right in the recent flurry of reports about Sars, and in Hu's endorsement on March 28 of the idea that the media should do less reporting on official meetings, and more on matters that people care about. When they face their next crisis, he predicts, China's leaders will adopt "a quicker, more open way of handling it." If the price for acting otherwise is economic, then he may well be right.
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