The Globalisation Virus

China has been hailed as the engine of growth for the world economy. Now its ill-repute as the incubationsite for the deadly SARS virus puts China and its new leadership in a different spotlight. The openness andefficiency that the crisis requires will put China's secretive, bureaucratic system to the test. How theleaders deal with the crisis will not only affect China's trade, travel and other interactions with the worldbut the country's domestic political future as well.

An incidental but important effect of the SARS crisis in China could be its short-run impact on the contestfor power between outgoing and incoming generations of leaders, and its long-run impact on the pace of China'stransition to a more modern, more responsive, and ultimately more democratic style of leadership.

The disease attacked in China just as the Communist Party was transferring power from one leader to anotherwith the incumbent leader still alive, something that no large communist country has accomplished before.

Last November, when the Communist Party rules said Jiang Zemin must retire, he resisted. He succeeded inkeeping the position of head of the military commission, but the CCP Central Committee required him to stepdown from the top positions in the party and the government. The elderly Jiang intended to follow the DengXiaoping model, continuing to call the shots from his living room while the younger officials, President andParty General Secretary Hu Jintao and Premier Wen Jiabao remained in his shadow. Photographs of Jiang stilldominated the front page of the People's Daily. Many commentators predicted that the full succession wouldtake five years.

The SARS emergency has changed the political time-table by putting the public spotlight on President Hu andPremier Wen. These younger leaders have seized the opportunity to prove their mettle and weaken Jiang Zemin'sability to manipulate from the sidelines. Controlling the disease requires quick decisions and authoritativeorders to regional governments and public health and other agencies, actions only the President and Premiercan take. It is their speeches and actions that now dominate the news, while Jiang is almost invisible.Reportedly, the Politburo met and decided to fire the health minister and mayor of Beijing for covering up theepidemic from November to March and only informed Jiang after the fact.

If the first crisis of the new administration had been an international one – say a visit by Taiwan'sPresident to the United States or a collision with an American military aircraft – Jiang Zemin, as China'ssenior statesman and military head, would have been front and center.

SARS is a domestic crisis in which the public expects the leaders running the government to take charge andproduce results. President Hu and Premier Wen, after assuming their government jobs at the March 9 NationalPeople's Congress, have been in constant motion, holding Politburo meetings, issuing directives, and firingand hiring officials responsible for SARS. They are operating under intense media scrutiny, scrutiny they haveactively sought out in a new pattern for Chinese leadership.

Chinese people are much better informed today than in the past about gaps between official pronouncementsand the on-the-ground reality, thanks to the internet, cable television, commercialized press, and cellphones. Afraid for their health and warned against gathering in public places, they are glued to their TV setsand computers, paying close attention to what their leaders are saying and doing.

President Hu and Premier Wen are capitalizing on the new sources of information instead of trying to blockthem as the older generation did. Appearing on television, the leaders are defying convention as theypersonally blast the initial bureaucratic cover-up and apologize to the public, instead of defending thegovernment. The decision to fire not just the health minister, but also the mayor of Beijing, who was a closeassociate of President Hu's, sent a public signal that from now on officials, even the well-connected ones,would be held accountable for poor job performance. Premier Wen, meeting with Southeast Asian leaders inBangkok, even declared that protecting people's health was more important than the economy.

Hu and Wen are now talking about "the public's right to know." The government is holding twice aweek televised press conferences on SARS and publishing daily statistical reports on the epidemic. ThePropaganda Department, held responsible for the initial news blackout on SARS, in a break from precedent hasnot issued any official line on the epidemic that the media must follow.

By choosing to give people the facts, the new leaders have discredited the old leaders and boosted theirown power. The public will expect them to continue this pattern of openness even after the epidemic is over.

A new generation of leaders in charge offers hope, but no certainty that China can succeed in containingthe SARS epidemic before it kills large numbers of people and cuts long-term growth. It will take not only thenew style of information openness Hu and Wen have adopted but also a revival of government authority afterdecades of market free-for-all that has seriously damaged or abolished institutions that protected the public.China was once a model of Third World public health care; but after two decades of market reform and cuts ingovernment financing, the public health system, especially in the countryside, has deteriorated greatly.According to Henk Bekedam, the Chinese representative to the WHO, "The public health system hascollapsed."

If China's new leaders succeed in controlling the epidemic, the political aftermath is likely to be a moreeffective and responsive regime, although not yet a democratic one. If they fail, the growing number ofvictims and serious economic fallout could become the symbol of communist systemic failure like the Chernobylaccident and its cover-up did in 1989 in the Soviet Union. If that were to happen in China, the kind of regimethat would emerge to pick up the pieces is impossible to predict.