China looking for SARS' silver lining
By Shiping Tang
BEIJING - The talk in Beijing now is: US Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld's "shock and awe" strategy in Iraq with smart bombs is nothing compared with the shock and awe by the "smart virus" known as SARS.
For the past half-year, severe acute respiratory syndrome, which began in the coastal province of Guangdong, has swept into inland China and across the globe. While at first China tried to restrict spread of the disease without public warning, things quickly got out of control. When people in Hong Kong, Singapore, and Vietnam began to get infected by the virus, SARS became a bona fide domestic and international crisis for the new Chinese leadership, unseen since the 1997 Asian financial crisis.
Like the 1997 crisis, the SARS crisis also struck at a seemingly improbable time. In 1997, East Asian countries were basking in the glory of the regional economic miracle and looking forward to another decade of robust economic growth. Likewise, China was also in a great mood before SARS struck.
Indeed, just before the "official" outbreak of SARS, the Chinese Communist Party concluded its 16th congress, and a new group of leaders took the reins in Beijing. Economic growth in the first quarter was more robust than most economists predicted. International trade was booming, and foreign direct investment (FDI) continued to arrive. China was looking forward to the next 20 years as the window of strategic importance for China's development into an economic powerhouse. In all, everything seemed to be going well for China.
Things are quite different now, and this may be but the beginning.
China came out of the 1997 crisis in a much stronger position. By upholding the value of its currency, China earned toasts from its neighboring countries, the United States, Europe, and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) as the "bulwark of stability", and shored up its image as a "responsible great power". After the crisis, China became the new FDI hotbed, pulling money from all over the world.
This time, however, China risks going back to its pre-1997-crisis status.
SARS has already struck China's foreign trade and tourism, which now contribute significantly to the country's total gross domestic product (GDP). The economic growth rate this year is unlikely to reach the 8 percent predicted at the beginning of this year. Indeed, the World Bank has already lowered its forecast for China's GDP growth rate from 8 percent to 7.5 percent, and it may go even lower if the SARS crisis cannot be contained with the first half-year (barely two months left).
Second, China's image of "responsible great power" is in jeopardy. Regional countries are complaining that China did not alert them earlier so that they could have taken precautionary measures, and editorials and opinions from these countries are lashing out that China cannot be a responsible great power and does not know how to behave like one because Beijing has yet to grasp that China's policies will have far greater consequence in the age of globalization.
Third and most important, the crisis underscores the fact that the country's crisis management system remains extremely inadequate and ineffective. This ineffectiveness is caused not only by the lack of a basic infrastructure but, perhaps more important, by a lack of openness that is absolutely necessary for handling this kind of crisis in these ever-connected times.
China's crisis-management experience largely came from its heroic struggle against the great Yangtze flood in 1998. With sheer determination and manpower, the country was able to beat back the flood. But to handle the SARS crisis, sheer manpower is simply not the answer. It requires integrated work of experts and organizations, not soldiers, workers, and peasants. Most important, it requires an open and transparent government.
All these factors are prompting a serious re-examination of how China should be governed and what role the media should play. With proper attitude and action, China can still come out of the crisis in a much stronger position, just as it did after the 1997 crisis.
First, as recent directives from the Politburo indicated, much more openness in the media will likely emerge. While the new openness will not lead to freedom to criticize the Party or the central government, it would give less power to local officials to silence local and national media outlets from exposing indifference and ineffectiveness in facing this crisis and those still to come. The media will remain the voice of the Party (and therefore the state), but they will also become the eyes of the Party.
Second, the crisis may also lead to a new set of rules for appraising local officials' performance, which is now largely based on how they produce good economic growth numbers. Most local officials, believing they will get promoted only if they present good news instead of bad news, have great incentive to hide a budding crisis and disaster from the public and the central government. This was evident long before the SARS crisis. Local officials and governments routinely tried to hide such incidents as coal-mine explosions and food poisoning that killed scores of people from the pubic and the central authority by silencing the local media and refusing to let national media on to the scene. The central government now understands that local officials and governments' horrendous disregard of human life is fundamentally undermining people's trust in the government.
Therefore, if the new leadership does learn the right lesson from the SARS crisis, you may see far more bad news coming from China than ever before. But that should not be a reason not to go to or invest in China. Rather, it should be welcomed as a sign that China is truly becoming a more open and civilized society. And only a government that is responsible for its people will be a truly responsible great power.
From this angle, there may be a silver lining to the SARS crisis. As the Chinese characters for crisis suggest, a crisis is both a challenge and an opportunity.
Shiping Tang is deputy director of the Center for Regional Security Studies, Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, Beijing. He is also a co-director of the Sino-American Security Dialogue. The opinions expressed here are his personal views.
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