THE SARS OUTBREAK
The Plague Reaches Much Deeper
To limit political damage from the Sars scandal, China's leaders had to publicly recognize political accountability and the people's right to know. But the tension between their promises and reality is showing as the toll grows
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By Susan V. Lawrence/BEIJING
Issue cover-dated May 01, 2003
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WHAT DID PARTY chief and President Hu Jintao know and when did he know it? That's emerging as one of the key questions as China's new leaders battle to stem a growing political crisis over the official handling of the Sars virus, which has badly damaged the government's credibility both with the Chinese public and the international community.
At a press conference on April 20 that was supposed to be given by the health minister and the mayor of Beijing, a new executive vice-minister of health, Gao Qiang, appeared in their place. He admitted to the foreign and domestic media that confirmed cases of Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome in Beijing were nine times higher at 339 than the Health Ministry's report of 37 five days earlier. In addition, he said, the city had 405 suspected cases in its hospitals.
Within an hour of the news conference, the official Xinhua news agency in two one-sentence dispatches announced the removal of Health Minister Zhang Wenkang and Mayor Meng Xuenong from their Communist Party posts. They became the most high-profile officials sacked for negligence in a crisis--rather than for corruption--since the ousting of Communist Party General Secretary Zhao Ziyang during the Tiananmen protests in 1989.
After months of playing down the challenge posed by Sars, the leadership's new message is that the party does care about the people's health. It says the bureaucracy is under orders to work hard to stem the spread of the virus and keep the public informed, and inadequacies in the response so far are due to failures by lower-level officials. On April 22, Xinhua released a speech by Premier Wen Jiabao in which he said that all localities and workplaces must report about Sars in a "timely and accurate" manner and are "absolutely not permitted to delay reporting, cover up reporting or leave anything out of their reports." In cases of failure to comply, "local and departmental leaders will be held strictly responsible."
In Beijing, the revelations about the virus' spread caused panic. Face masks appeared in much greater numbers on the streets. The city closed schools for two weeks. Restaurants were empty. Despite official injunctions to university students to remain on campus, professors said many students were fleeing to their home towns. Migrant workers began heading home, too.
Hu and his colleagues are in dangerous territory now. To put themselves on the right side of the crisis, they were forced in words and deeds to embrace publicly as benchmarks two powerful concepts: political accountability and the public's right to be informed about matters that directly affect their lives. From now on, China's public and, perhaps more importantly, the international community will judge them on whether their actions live up to those commitments. The leaders may also have to brace themselves for more potentially damaging questions about what they knew about the epidemic's spread and when they knew it.
Early reports in the state-controlled media challenge the official picture of senior officials being kept in the dark by wayward local bureaucrats. Evidence of exactly what Hu knew may never be revealed, but if Hu is shown to have been complicit in the cover-up, any popular support that he wins with the new candour and accountability will be lost.
THE TWO-MONTH GAP
A February 20 article in Southern Daily, the mouthpiece of the Guangdong Province Communist Party Committee, says that provincial health officials realized they had an emergency on February 6, when they recorded 45 new cases of atypical pneumonia in a day. On February 8, the province reported the situation to the party leadership and State Council in Beijing. State Council "leaders," who should include Premier Wen, commented on the report, and on February 9 they sent Vice-Minister of Health Ma Xiaowei to Guangdong to investigate.
On or just before February 11, meanwhile, Politburo member and Minister of Public Security Zhou Yongkang, instructed the Guangdong Public Security Bureau on the role it should play in handling the outbreak. Acting on those orders, Guangdong police stepped up patrols, stationed officers outside supermarkets to restrain panic buying of medicine, and "strengthened supervision and control of harmful information on-line, and prevented dissemination of rumours in a timely way." They also asked officials from major Web sites in Guangdong to "strengthen self-discipline"--the Chinese term for self-censorship--and play a role in ensuring that "positive news" was given about the outbreak.
So far unexplained is why Hu Jintao's first public comments sounding the alarm about Sars did not come for another two months after Guangdong's first report to the central leadership.
Beijing did not admit to having any Sars cases at all until March 26, when it said it had 10. After that, official numbers rose only incrementally, even as rumours of many more cases swept the city and a retired senior military doctor said he believed many dozens of cases were in military hospitals. Only when Executive Vice-Minister of Health Gao admitted to some 700 confirmed and suspected Sars cases in Beijing up to April 18 did the extent of the official cover-up begin to come clear.
In the two days after Gao spoke, the Ministry of Health quietly updated its Beijing numbers twice to include cases through to April 21. It added 249 to the confirmed tally, and 261 to the suspected list. Perhaps the government was truly coming clean. But why didn't the authorities release fuller numbers at Gao's press conference? And why were the new numbers buried in Xinhua reports that many state-controlled national papers only ran on their inside pages?
Commentaries in Beijing's populist Xin Bao, or Star Daily, newspaper on April 21 helped set the tone for the new popular expectations of the government. One, reprinted from Shanghai's Wenhui Pao daily, was headlined: "Citizens must not be deprived of their right to know." Another by the paper's own commentator, said: "The cover-up is more frightening than the disease."
The timing of the announcement of the dismissals was surely meant in part to distract popular attention from the ballooning statistics, as well as to warn officials elsewhere in the country to end their cover-ups. But a nagging question for many in Beijing was why the mayor was cashiered, rather than the city's more powerful and more visible Communist Party Secretary Liu Qi--a member of the party's 24-strong Politburo. A very likely part of the answer: factional politics. Liu, like the dismissed minister, is close to former President Jiang Zemin. Mayor Meng, who took office only in February, was considered close to Hu. So Jiang lost one man, Hu lost one, and the leadership contained findings of negligence below the Politburo level.
Reporting of the sackings in the state media suggests that parts of the leadership are unwilling to drive home accountability as a lesson. The People's Daily, published by the Communist Party Central Committee, ran the announcements below the fold on its front page, and gave no explanations for them. Li Xiguang, academic dean of the School of Journalism and Communication at Tsinghua University, says it created the impression it was printing the news "in a place where people could ignore it." The leaders and their media "are emphasizing different agendas," Li says. The People's Daily followed past practice for dismissals, he adds. "They keep it very low profile" out of concern for "face-saving, politeness, and courtesy," Li says. The Xinhua dispatch about the two officials losing their posts still referred them as "comrades."
That anyone was toppled over the scandal is progress. "It isn't that leaders themselves necessarily wanted to hold these two men accountable, but they were forced to do so by the pressure of public opinion," says Liu Junning, an independent Beijing-based political scientist, who adds that by public opinion he mainly means international opinion. He sees this as a step forward from the past system in which higher-level officials only sought accountability from below. "China still lacks a mechanism to make government directly accountable to the people," he laments. His remedy isn't Hu Jintao's. It's representative democracy, with elections and the legitimacy they confer. "Only when their power really comes from the people will officials really be accountable to the people," Liu declares.
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