BY: Andrew Bolt
SARS is not just a new disease that has already killed more than 290
people
and will kill many more.
Nor is it even just a catastrophe that threatens to close airlines, ruin
Hong Kong, devastate Asian economies and change the way millions take
holidays.
Still bigger than that, it could yet be the disease that perversely
helps
bring freedom to communist China.
Many people have died of SARS simply because China is not free, and
educated
Chinese today will be brooding about that.
SARS killed its first victim in Guangdong province in November, but even
as
more people fell ill, China’s muzzled media was banned from saying a
word.
Not until February 1, as millions of Chinese prepared to visit relatives
for
the Chinese New Year, was the public told there was a deadly new disease
in
the south. But by then SARS was already on its way to unsuspecting Hong
Kong
— and to more than 30 other countries.
Even then China refused to tell the full truth, or let its media report
it.
As recently as April 4, the official People’s Daily was still reporting
that
SARS was “largely under control”. The number of victims in the capital,
Beijing, was put at just 37.
But last week that lie was exposed, too.
China’s leaders confessed Beijing actually had many more cases — more
than
750 with 39 deaths.
China’s health minister was sacked, as was Beijing’s mayor. Schools were
closed for two weeks, and thousands of people were quarantined. But SARS
had
already been left to spread to China’s poor rural provinces, leaving new
Premier Wen Jiabao to warn the “consequences could be too dreadful to
contemplate”.
So why are China’s leaders now so nervous?
They will know that SARS threatens to do to their regime what the
explosion
at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant did to the Soviet Union in 1986.
For 18 days after that catastrophic blast, the communist regime of
Mikhail
Gorbachev said nothing. In the absence of any reporting, panic spread.
So
did suspicion and a fatal distrust in a government that seemed unwilling
to
inform and protect its people, and was far too unaccountable.
The crisis forced Gorbachev to lift restrictions on the media, and from
there the Soviet Union’s mystique and power quickly crumbled, until the
whole sick circus collapsed in 1991.
Will this happen in China? Maybe not. China isn’t in as terrible a shape
as
the Soviet Union was then, and its leaders seem smarter.
But China also has an increasingly rich and assertive public, who will
learn
from this that living under a dictatorial regime is a health hazard. How
long will they put up with that?
Original article date: 28/Apr/2003
Category: Media Report
