Under Global Spotlight, China’s New Leaders Have to Reform

China has been hailed as the engine of growth for the world economy. Now its ill-repute as the incubation site for the deadly SARS virus puts China and its new leadership in a different spotlight. The openness and efficiency that the crisis requires will put China's secretive, bureaucratic system to the test. How the leaders deal with the crisis will not only affect China's trade, travel and other interactions with the world but 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 contest for power between outgoing and incoming generations of leaders, and its long-run impact on the pace of China's transition 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 another with 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 in keeping the position of head of the military commission, but the CCP Central Committee required him to step down from the top positions in the party and the government. The elderly Jiang intended to follow the Deng Xiaoping model, continuing to call the shots from his living room while the younger officials, President and Party General Secretary Hu Jintao and Premier Wen Jiabao remained in his shadow. Photographs of Jiang still dominated the front page of the People's Daily. Many commentators predicted that the full succession would take five years.

The SARS emergency has changed the political time-table by putting the public spotlight on President Hu and Premier Wen. These younger leaders have seized the opportunity to prove their mettle and weaken Jiang Zemin's ability to manipulate from the sidelines. Controlling the disease requires quick decisions and authoritative orders to regional governments and public health and other agencies, actions only the President and Premier can 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 the epidemic 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's President to the United States or a collision with an American military aircraft – Jiang Zemin, as China's senior 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 and produce results. President Hu and Premier Wen, after assuming their government jobs at the March 9 National People's Congress, have been in constant motion, holding Politburo meetings, issuing directives, and firing and hiring officials responsible for SARS. They are operating under intense media scrutiny, scrutiny they have actively sought out in a new pattern for Chinese leadership.

Chinese people are much better informed today than in the past about gaps between official pronouncements and the on-the-ground reality, thanks to the internet, cable television, commercialized press, and cell phones. Afraid for their health and warned against gathering in public places, they are glued to their TV sets and 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 block them as the older generation did. Appearing on television, the leaders are defying convention as they personally blast the initial bureaucratic cover-up and apologize to the public, instead of defending the government. The decision to fire not just the health minister, but also the mayor of Beijing, who was a close associate 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 in Bangkok, 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 a week televised press conferences on SARS and publishing daily statistical reports on the epidemic. The Propaganda Department, held responsible for the initial news blackout on SARS, in a break from precedent has not 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 their own 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 containing the SARS epidemic before it kills large numbers of people and cuts long-term growth. It will take not only the new style of information openness Hu and Wen have adopted but also a revival of government authority after decades 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 in government 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 has collapsed."

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