BEIJING - In this time of waning severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) cases, Chinese President Hu Jintao is being simultaneously pulled in several directions as issues unrelated to the illness are re-emerging in China's political landscape.
The people of Beijing are fed up with the SARS alarm. Almost nobody wears the previously compulsory mask and gloves. After weeks of tension when nobody was going out, everybody is pouring into restaurants and parks throughout the city. China wants to put the epidemic behind it quickly and continue the rapid economic growth that characterized the first three months of the year. The rest of the world is also keen on Chinese economic growth, as the United States, Europe and Japan are crawling around zero percent growth, and China could tow regional and global growth until the US or European economies pick up.
These demands create pressure to get past SARS as soon as possible and minimize the last trickle of infection coming these days from Beijing and some of the countryside.
There are also domestic grounds for quickly ending the SARS saga in China. People coming from Beijing are treated as outcasts - the capital has been virtually isolated from the rest of the country. People who contracted SARS and were dismissed from hospitals can't find new jobs. They are advised not to come to work, otherwise their colleagues would leave. Everybody is afraid of the contagion, and the recent transparency on the spread of the disease has increased the fear for people coming from infected areas and for people who have been infected. People do not fully trust the government and, accustomed as they are to decades of under-reporting, tend to overestimate the gravity of any official statement about any given disaster, and especially about SARS. Therefore when the official government announced there were hundreds and then thousands of infected people in Beijing, many believed the disease had hundreds of thousands of victims.
Furthermore, because a single SARS infection could force whole office buildings into quarantine and affect the economic well-being of all employees, there was incentive for firms and companies to under-report or hide cases of infection. In one case, an employee of an import-export company in Beijing did not come to work for several days. When his colleagues inquired about him to the head of the company, he pleaded ignorance. Only many weeks later they all learned this person had been ill with SARS, had been quarantined and had fully recovered. Employees suspected that their employer knew about their colleague's predicament but hid it to avoid the quarantine for his office and the complete stop of the work. When his colleagues learned the fellow was coming back to work, they all ran away, and the boss asked him to stay home for the time being. On a small scale this was what occurred with the flight of millions of workers from the cities to the countryside.
Decades of official lies and misguided policies have been forced down the throats of common Chinese, most notably the Great Leap Forward in the late 1950s and the Cultural Revolution 10 years later. This has seriously dented people's trust in official statements. China will need a new social pact to build trust between the central government and the Chinese people. For Beijing, this is an immense task that will take time and will occur only gradually, and the first step will be to defeat SARS convincingly.
Almost paradoxically, economics and social issues are pushing the government to minimize the number of new infections. This might be very dangerous. If the disease were to flare up again, the government could be caught red-handed. Beijing is taking unprecedented measures of control against the danger of a new rapid outbreak of SARS. People working in many sensitive offices are still closed in, forbidden to go out for fear of possible danger. In the countryside, the government gives rewards to people who "out" others infected (or possibly infected) with SARS. Anti-fever drugs are sold only in hospitals to ensure that people with fevers (a preliminary symptom of SARS) will go to hospitals.
All these measures would be impossible without the strong party apparatus and the authoritarian system of the country. However, these measures are in response to social and economic needs. These needs mandate disclosure of a new spread of the illness, if Beijing's luck turns sour again. (2003-06-10 Asia Times)
