Quotes of the Day
The streets of the Dual Springs neighborhood, a migrant-worker hub in northern Beijing, are deserted. That's no surprise: more than 13,000 people have been quarantined in China's capital to halt the insidious spread of severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS), and even those not under house arrest have hunkered down at home in a massive rite of self-isolation. But the shacks of Dual Springs have as few people inside as outside. Despite an April 30 governmental edict ordering migrant workers to stay put to prevent them spreading the disease farther into the nation's interior, most of Beijing's outlying shantytowns have emptied as their frightened residents flee the SARS hot zone. Wang Shu is one of the few souls left in Dual Springs, and he's had to temporarily close his pool hall because of a citywide decree to shutter all entertainment venues until May 9. "If I can't reopen then, I'll have to shut the business and leave, too," says the native of rural Henan province. He'll get out any way he can, he says, whether by squeezing onto the overflowing trains or hitching a ride from a sympathetic bus driver.
Authoritarian regimes don't win many popularity contests, but their one selling point is an ability to control their citizens. Singapore ruthlessly nipped its SARS problem in the bud with draconian quarantine measures—one of the few times the island nation's authoritarian reflexes were cheered by the international community, which rewarded Singapore by keeping it off the World Health Organization's (WHO) travel advisory list. But instead of using its vast autocratic apparatus early on, Beijing's leaders lost key weeks in curbing the disease by pretending there was no problem. Now, China's central government is playing a desperate game of catch-up as the number of reported SARS cases ticks ever upward—there were more than 3,900 confirmed patients, 2,500 suspected cases and 190 deaths as of last weekend. If the tide of nervous migrant workers continues to disperse the disease into the countryside, the fear that has already gripped the capital could spread nationwide.
Official denial is out. Now bureaucrats are tripping over themselves trying to introduce anti-SARS measures. Overnight, even the tiniest village has slapped up posters describing SARS symptoms and prevention measures, an indication that the Party network can be amazingly efficient if it's so inclined. On Friday, foreign tourists were barred from Tibet, one of many travel restrictions meant to curb the spread of the virus to SARS-free regions. China's central bank got in on the action by retaining all its used notes for 24 hours and disinfecting the tattered bills before sending them back out into circulation. The Party's central propaganda department has also been spinning madly, churning out songs extolling health workers, who will be named "revolutionary martyrs" if they die fighting the virus. Across Beijing, public venues from cinemas, karaoke parlors to swimming pools and basketball courts were closed. That left people little choice but to stay home and watch cheesy variety shows aimed at buoying populist sentiment in these panicked times. A catchy excerpt from one poem on Beijing TV: "We have the closest feelings for the central leadership. We are Beijingers. The city government shares our popular feeling."
The free flow of information is in—an unusual shift in a country where the press is monitored and muzzled. Daily newspapers are saturated with coverage of the crisis; reporting includes exhaustively detailed regional and national tallies of the number of SARS victims. Beijing's new Mayor Wang Qishan, who replaced the disgraced Meng Xuenong on April 20, willingly parried with foreign journalists last week during a press conference aired live on local TV—a radical departure for a leadership that sometimes even scripts the angle of a handshake between two officials. Likewise China's new tag team at the top, President Hu and Premier Wen, has encouraged openness—at least in handling SARS. Now, many will begin pressuring the government to show the same transparency every day. "After SARS, there will be a big rethink of the political structure," predicts Zhang Dajun, founder of the independent Economic Watch Center in Beijing. "The people at the top right now know there is this demand. It doesn't matter whether they're willing or not."
At the nation's élite universities, once China's breeding grounds for political activity, students have taken the trend toward openness as a sign of creeping liberalization. Young Internet surfers have inundated chat rooms with a new slogan: "Keep it up, Brother Hu." The message echoed calls nearly two decades earlier when students championed the newly promoted reformist leader Deng Xiaoping by chanting en masse, "Hello, Xiaoping." The support of politically active youth helped cement Deng's authority, and students today hope to do the same for Hu. "We need to show our support for Hu Jintao, because if he becomes weak, the Old Guard could reassert their power," says Kitty Wang, a student at Shanghai's Jiaotong University, former President Jiang Zemin's alma mater. "That would be terrible, because many of the reforms we are hoping for will not have a chance to grow." In this telegenic age, students have also taken to Wen, who has fashioned himself into a man of the people by mixing with locals on camera—something Jiang and his coterie rarely bothered to do. "He has a nice face and seems to really care about people," says a Fudan University student surnamed Xia. "I feel I can trust him more than the old leaders." And so it is that a health crisis exacerbated by political incompetence and deceit has turned into a political windfall for China's new leaders.
But to secure their victory Hu and Wen will have to bring SARS under control quickly, and it's not clear that is possible. In Beijing alone, the caseload has been rising by an average of 100 patients a day, and there is no sign that the contagion has been contained. To cope with the ballooning number of victims, the central government is desperately beefing up the country's inadequate health-care infrastructure. Last week, construction of a 1,000-bed SARS treatment facility on the outskirts of the capital was completed in an astonishing six days. Yet the WHO is worried about a lack of supplies at all hospitals, starting with masks and ending with ambulances, plus nearly everything in between. The People's Liberation Army has also sent 1,200 of its medical workers to Beijing, but these reinforcements look paltry given the exploding caseload. Beijing Mayor Wang acknowledged last week that the capital has just 3,000 doctors and nurses familiar with respiratory diseases and the emergency procedures used to treat them. "How many know how to cut into the windpipes of SARS patients? How many know how to use respiratory machines?" Wang asked. "We face very big difficulties." Indeed, the danger is that much of China's highly visible anti-SARS activity remains uncoordinated and ineffective—even if it has convinced the public that the government has matters in hand. Beijing's efforts to prevent the outbreak from radiating out of hard-hit areas—critical to containing the disease—are proving porous at best. Although a government directive has forbidden university students and migrant workers in Beijing from returning home, it has been routinely ignored as thousands have headed to the train stations unimpeded. Meanwhile, a newspaper in Hefei, Anhui's provincial capital, reported on Friday that one suspected SARS patient turned up in the city after escaping from a Beijing hospital where he had been put into isolation.
At the Yongdingmen Train Station in southern Beijing, the mixed success of China's preventive measures is starkly apparent. Here, a teenage girl operates a thermal-imaging machine meant to take passengers' temperatures so that possible SARS victims can be identified and quarantined. But most passengers just stride past the machine, and there's little one young woman can do to stop them. At the station's clinic, one of its workers surnamed Zuo didn't even know that migrant workers are supposed to stay put in Beijing. "I just learned how to take people's temperature," she says, holding her new thermometer gingerly. "That's all I'm supposed to do."
With the central government seemingly unable to enforce the domestic travel ban, some villagers have taken matters into their own hands. On a byway of a highway leading out of Beijing, a pair of elderly men guarding entry to their village forced drivers to stop and pay 50¢ each for a spritz of disinfectant on their vehicles. Elsewhere, police and health officials distributed thermometers to travelers and recorded identity-card numbers.
But since infected people can carry the SARS virus for a week before showing symptoms, who knows how many cases have escaped such impromptu dragnets? A migrant last month returning from the capital to his home village in Guyuan county, 300 kilometers outside Beijing, passed on the disease to his mother. She died in a hospital in nearby Zhangjiakou, where 13 others have contracted SARS. Li Tao, who runs a Beijing organization that provides health information to migrants, fears there are many more such cases to come. "Migrants showing symptoms are already going home, because the job sites are shutting down and they haven't been paid," he says.
Beyond the obvious health problems, it is the economic dislocations posed by the epidemic that may ultimately do the greatest damage to the government's credibility. China depends heavily upon foreign investment, which totaled a record $53 billion last year, to build new factories and create jobs for the underemployed, impoverished masses. So far the epidemic hasn't disrupted assembly lines; analysts and representatives for multinational companies operating in China say that, while travel restrictions have temporarily crimped the ability to do business face-to-face, no lasting problems are expected if the epidemic is brought under control quickly. But the mishandling of the crisis in its opening stages has served as a reminder of China's chronic lack of transparency on everything from SARS statistics to the nation's bad-loan ratio—and of the inherent risk of putting too many eggs in the China basket. Although most international companies continue to express confidence in the country long-term, Taiwanese computer maker Acer said in late April that the killer bug had led it to postpone plans to shift its notebook production from Taiwan to the lower-cost mainland.
More ominous is the economic impact faced by the vast majority of China's citizens who work in small-scale service-industry jobs. Restaurants, retailers and other small businesses are being hit hard by the SARS panic because tourists aren't coming and locals aren't spending. They are hard pressed to keep their doors open, let alone pay their employees. According to the government, urban unemployment reached 4.1% at the end of March—a 22-year high. That figure is sure to spike as SARS' economic effect spreads. "In order to have social stability and economic stability, China really needs to have a minimum (GDP) growth rate of 7%," says Fan Jiang, executive director of Goldman Sachs in Hong Kong. Already, some China analysts have slashed their estimates of GDP growth from 8% to 6% for 2003—too low to generate enough new jobs for recent graduates and laid-off workers.
The only bulwark against a wider crisis appears to be the government's determination to vanquish the SARS virus—or at least contain the epidemic to the point that its citizenry can live and work as usual. So far, the public seems to be buying into the government's public-relations campaign. "I've read that once the weather gets warmer, the disease will disappear, so we'll be fine," says Li Tao, a software engineer in Hangzhou in Zhejiang province. Nobody's proved that theory yet, but it's a heartening thought. In the meantime, China's leaders can only hope that by beating the bug they'll earn the confidence they have already inspired. That way, they'll be fine too.
- Hannah Beech/Shanghai and MATTHEW FORNEY/BEIJING
- SARS could be a surprising boon for the country’s leaders—or a national disaster