Monday, May 19, 2003

By DAVID WALL

Special to The Japan Times

CAMBRIDGE, England -- The SARS epidemic centered in China has become a global issue. Most people in the world, even if they are not infected or in serious danger of infection, are indirectly affected by the restrictions on freedom of movement and economic downturns directly attributed to reactions the disease.

Take me for example: Colleagues, students, family and friends have been affected and my own work program and holiday plans have been seriously disrupted.

This morning I received an e-mail from an English friend who is a student at Inner Mongolia University in Hohhot. She has been virtually imprisoned ("quarantined") on the campus for some weeks now. Cambridge students I teach were supposed to go to Beijing for the second half of their courses; they have been sent to universities in the United States and Europe instead.

The European Union has suspended many of its programs in China. A friend who was coming to the end of a two-year management-training program in Beijing has been sent home to Spain, her course having been suspended. She has no idea what will now happen to the program in which she has invested so much.

One of my colleagues in London was one of the few British people to contract the disease in Beijing. He finished up in the London Hospital for Tropical Diseases; fortunately he has fully recovered.

My son lives in Toronto. Early this year he went freelance as a designer of computer-controlled lighting systems. His business, among many others, collapsed after SARS arrived in Toronto. His partner is a travel agent whose business also was devastated.

Last month I traveled to China to speak at the World Economic Forum's Beijing Business Leaders' Summit. The meeting was canceled. Stuck in Beijing with nothing to do, I moved to Hohhot, capital of Inner Mongolia, having been told that it was SARS-free. It was not.

Conferences in Beijing at which I was supposed present papers this month and next month have been canceled. A colleague from rural China with whom I am collaborating on one paper cannot come to Europe, as she would have had to come via Beijing and her local Communist Party office will not allow that.

For our holidays this summer, my wife and I are planning to visit western China. Those plans are now threatened.

More than 100 countries around the world have placed restrictions on travel to and from China. Foreign investment in China is falling.

While all of this is annoying and frustrating, they are nothing compared to the suffering of the people contracting the disease and their families. They also pale into insignificance with the political consequences of the epidemic. These are only just beginning to become clear.

Here in Cambridge a conspiracy theory is circulating to the effect that the SARS epidemic was started by the U.S. as an act of biological warfare. The argument runs that the virus was released in China by the U.S. government in retaliation for the Chinese position on Iraq.

The story, apparently started in Russia where scientists have claimed that the virus does not occur in nature, has itself gone through various mutations. It was picked up in China and spread like wild fire over the Internet. It has its supporters among the Chinese leadership.

Guangdong Gov. Huang Huahua recently said, quoting a Hong Kong newspaper, that the epidemic started in the United States in February 2002, and moved from there to China. He left open the question of how it got from the U.S. to China.

Huang has a vested interest in convincing people that the SARS epidemic is a U.S. plot. Many people think he is one of those responsible for the spread of the disease. He is deputy to Politburo Member Zhang Dejiang, who is also the Communist Party boss of Guangdong Province, where most people, including the World Health Organization, believe it began.

Most people also believe it was the failure of the Zhang-led Guangdong government to deal properly with the virus when it was first identified that enabled it to grow into epidemic proportions and possibly become a permanent disease. Zhang is believed to have started the coverup of the disease, being a member of the group that imposed a news blackout.

It was a Guangdong doctor who, knowing that he was infectious, triggered the transmission into Hong Kong, Toronto, Vietnam, Taiwan, Shanghai and Beijing. He did this by checking into a Hong Kong hotel for eight hours before moving to a hospital. He is dead now, but so are many other people.

When Chinese President Hu Jintao announced last month the purge of 120 officials for their role in the coverup, including the minister of health and the mayor of Beijing, no officials or party leaders in Guangdong were on the list. As CNN Senior China Analyst Willy Wo-Lap Lam has pointed out, Huang is a protege of former President Jiang Zemin.

A few weeks ago I wrote that, although political power in China had apparently passed peacefully to Hu when he was appointed president of China at the National Peoples' Congress in March, adding to his position of general secretary of the Chinese Communist Party, real power remained with Jiang. I argued that this would become obvious when some event occurred over which Hu and Jiang differed. There would then be a power struggle that would make it clear that Jiang is still the boss of China. I didn't know that such an event would occur so quickly!

After a whistle-blowing Peoples Liberation Army doctor (where is he now?) exposed, in mid-April, the government data on SARS for the lies they were, Hu and Premier Wen Jiabao took control.

Hu admitted the coverup and promised that in the future a true account would be given on the progress of the disease and on government efforts to deal with it. He also pledged to sack officials who had covered up the news of the disease and failed to contain it. The word went out that the battle against SARS was being conducted "under the leadership of the CCP with Hu Jintao at its core."

Since Hu started firing party cadres and threatening to deal with corruption in the CCP, even at the top of its hierarchy, Jiang and his faction have been fighting back. They have won. As Lam also reports, Vice President Zeng Qinghong, the leader of the Jiang faction, said recently that fighting SARS is "a concrete action in implementing the important Theory of the Three Represents."

For China watchers this is code for "Jiang Zemin is back in control." Hu and Wen have been sidelined. The first consequence of this is that people no longer believe what the Chinese government is saying about SARS. Even World Health Organization doctors have expressed their doubts.

David Wall teaches at the East Asia Institute of the University of Cambridge and is associate fellow at the Royal Institute of International Affairs.

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