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BEIJING: A week ago, Beijing was saying it only had 37 cases of SARS and the health minister was declaring China safe to visit. And world outrage was growing as the Communist leadership trod a familiar path of denial.
Now, the minister and the Beijing mayor have been sacked, authorities have admitted the number of cases of Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome in the capital is 10 times higher and the local media has been encouraged to report on the epidemic.
In the process, the country’s new leadership has learned a salutary lesson, analysts said on Monday.
With the Internet, the mobile phone and other by-products of globalization, China’s Communist leaders can no longer put a lid on bad news, especially when it is getting worse every day.
Within the week, they took a series of remarkably rapid decisions as Hu Jintao, Communist Party boss since November, and Premier Wen Jiabao, in office just a month, stamped the seal of the new generation on the evolving political landscape.
Analysts said the decisions were a sign they were trying to revive the party’s image as a champion of the people and could be a harbinger of reforms that breed more transparency, including greater freedom for media used to not reporting bad news.
“This is the age of the Internet and mobile phone. They realize you can no longer treat the people as the ‘blind masses’,” said a Chinese source with ties to top leaders.
“You can’t treat the people like fools,” said the source.
Even before the sackings, Beijing residents were well aware they were being lied to — the streets were full of whispers about hospitals packed with SARS patients, of school shutdowns and fears of a far higher toll.
NEW TO OFFICE: It took a good deal of foreign criticism before China’s leaders awoke to SARS and they are now trying to repair an image suffering its worst battering since the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre.
The World Health Organization and the European Union criticized Beijing for a lack of transparency about the disease, believed to have originated in southern Guangdong province. US Health Secretary Tommy Thompson said China had contributed to the spread of SARS around the world.
And economists were warning of a hit to China’s fast-growing economy, which the leadership relies on to create enough jobs to prevent social unrest.
Hu and Wen appear to be trying to transform a party which had grown distant from the people by emphasising the ideologies of Karl Marx, Mao Zedong or Deng Xiaoping over more down to earth matters like wages, jobs and health care.
“This generation of leaders is trying to demonstrate they are more pragmatic, easy to approach and closer to reality,” Chinese political commentator Wu Jiaxiang said in an interview.
“They’re trying to make this country normal and not dominated by ideology,” Wu added.
But few expected the new leadership was prepared, so soon into office, to take the bold measures they did.
Last week, Hu and Wen appeared at hospitals, meeting doctors and nurses treating SARS patients.
They ordered a probe into the cover-up at Beijing hospitals that exposed more than 300 unreported cases and 402 suspected cases. They demanded full disclosure and threatened harsh punishment for officials caught covering up cases.
On Sunday, they sent a vice health minister to disclose the new figures live on national television. And they sacked Health Minister Zhang Wenkang and Beijing Mayor Meng Xuenong.
Holding officials accountable is rare in China. The nation has a long record of suppressing bad news, hiding disasters and fudging figures in the name of stability, including the deaths of about 30 million people in a famine that sprang from the disastrous Great Leap Forward that started in 1958.
But on Monday, state-controlled media were unleashed to report on SARS, publishing Beijing’s alarming spike in cases and criticizing the two sacked officials for negligence.
“This negative case showed that the central leadership’s emphasis on transforming the working methods by being closer to reality is very crucial,” the official Xinhua news agency said in a commentary published in several newspapers.
But analysts warned the war against the spread of SARS was not launched in full until more than five months after the first case emerged in Guangdong and it remained to be seen how long the media will be off the leash.—Reuters
