Out of Mao's Shadow: The Struggle for the Soul of a New China (29 page)

When I asked about the pressures of governing a county like Linquan, he acknowledged serious financial problems. The county’s budget was limited, he said, and it was difficult to pay the salaries of all the people on the payroll. Especially after 1995, he said, townships and villages fell deep into debt as the ranks of officials mushroomed. “You help arrange a job for someone, and they arrange a job for someone else. Add it all up, and it’s taking ten minutes to take attendance,” he said. But when I asked him why so many officials were necessary, he replied, “Generally speaking, it’s to develop the economy, to make ordinary people rich.”

Zhang said one of the most difficult challenges was enforcing the one-child policy. If too many children were born in excess of state quotas, he said, a party official’s career would be in jeopardy. But that never happened to him. On the contrary, Zhang said he handled his birth planning duties so well he was named a model worker and elected director of the provincial birth planning association. “I was very strict, and I established my own set of methods,” he said. What kind of methods? “I mainly relied on propaganda work, letting cadres take the lead,” he said. “I didn’t use coercive measures.” Then he told me how he handled a mother of two who was six months pregnant with a third child:

Zhang started laughing, adding that the woman wasn’t wearing any underwear. I asked him to continue. He said the woman’s father pulled her out of the water, and eventually, as other relatives were summoned to put pressure on her, she agreed to an abortion. “Later, I talked to her and I said, ‘You already have two boys. The burden is heavy enough. How many more do you want?’ I said, ‘When your life gets better, you won’t curse me. You’ll thank me.’ We went to the hospital, and I waited there. She said she would have the shot the next day, but I said no. You’re already here today. Have the shot today.”

Zhang said he traveled to the United States in the early 1990s on an inspection trip arranged by the Ministry of Construction. The delegation visited several cities, but he was most impressed when he saw a group of Somali protesters outside the White House. “Public order was excellent. Shout for a while, sit down and rest, drink some water. The police weren’t even there, and order was great,” he said. In China, he said, you couldn’t do that. “People here have insufficient awareness of the law. If they do anything forcefully, they will break the law.” As an example, he cited the behavior of peasants such as those from Wangying Village who petition the county over grievances. “It’s our job as officials to solve their problems. On the other hand, we can see that even after the masses developed the beginnings of democratic awareness, they still lack awareness of law. For example, they block the roads. They block the gate. They curse at people,” he said. “Our problem is their awareness of law isn’t strong enough. They can’t use the law to restrain themselves.”

This was one reason, he argued, why China wasn’t suited for a multiparty democracy. “China has China’s conditions,” he said. “The leadership of the Communist Party developed over a long period of time, and it has the public’s trust. If it were overthrown, the masses wouldn’t accept it. Free elections would lead to great disorder, because the masses are already used to the current system.

“I’m an intellectual, and I’ve always believed in the Communist Party. There’s no doubt that some of our superstructure needs reform, but we must maintain the stability of the nation,” he added. “If there was chaos in the nation, no one would be able to endure it.”

I suggested that some people believed the one-party system might be incapable of restraining officials and protecting the rights of peasants. Zhang shook his head. “It’s actually the opposite,” he said. “Only under this system, with China under the leadership of the Communist Party, can the interests of the peasants be guaranteed. Look how satisfied the peasants are now.”

T
he men who ran the Communist Party had good reason to be pleased with themselves as they celebrated the arrival of the Year of the Goat in February 2003. They presided over the world’s most dynamic economy, which had recorded more than a decade of uninterrupted breakneck growth. They had put down the worker protests in the rust belt and survived the worst of the labor unrest caused by the dismantling of state industry. They were enjoying new influence in international affairs and making good progress with preparations for the 2008 Summer Olympics. And they were halfway through a delicate leadership transition. The general secretary who took power after the Tiananmen massacre, Jiang Zemin, surrendered the party’s top job in November to Hu Jintao, the colorless bureaucrat who had been his heir apparent for more than a decade. In March, Jiang was scheduled to step down as the nation’s president, too. It was an important milestone—the most orderly and peaceful transfer of power in the history of modern China—and it meant the party had avoided the kind of destructive succession fight that often plagued authoritarian governments.

For many in China, the smooth transition was fresh evidence that the Communists had found a way to address the shortcomings of their autocratic political system without adopting democratic reforms or giving up power. They had already demonstrated that capitalism and authoritarianism could make a powerful combination: the party relied on its monopoly on power to push through painful economic reforms and used the prosperity generated by those reforms to strengthen its rule. The party’s experiment in grafting market-oriented policies onto the Leninist model of government had proved a smashing success, and in capitals around the world, politicians and pundits spoke of the Chinese model with awe, envy, and sometimes fear. Foreign investors and multinational corporations, meanwhile, flocked to the mainland in what seemed like the first gold rush of the twenty-first century.

But if the Communists had shown they could deliver economic growth at rates rivaling those of any democracy, it was still unclear how well they could meet other expectations of an increasingly complex and demanding society. Could their profit-driven model of authoritarianism stop the coal mine accidents? Could it deliver clean air and water? If the party maintained its stranglehold on civil society—its obsessive effort to control churches, charities, advocacy groups, labor unions—could it narrow the gap between rich and poor, or build an effective social safety net? Without a free press or independent courts, could it curb corruption or the abuse of power? The party had made many people wealthier but could it count on their support in hard times or inspire their loyalty?

An example of the limits of the Chinese political structure was the shameful AIDS crisis unfolding in central Henan Province. In the early 1990s, hundreds of thousands of impoverished farmers there contracted HIV by selling blood at state hospitals and private clinics run by local officials and their friends. These facilities often used unsanitary methods, including a process in which blood from several donors was mixed in a centrifuge to remove valuable plasma and then reinjected into them so they could recover faster and sell more blood. Such practices caused AIDS to spread quickly, and by the beginning of 2003, the disease had devastated villages across the Henan countryside. Bold leadership, grassroots activism, and the free flow of information are critical to stopping the spread of AIDS, but China’s rigid political system has never tolerated much of any of the three. Instead, the party’s instinctive response was to protect the officials who had profited from the blood trade—and to hide the outbreak. The police harassed and arrested activists who challenged the government to take action, and the censors restricted reporting on AIDS in the state media. The nation’s top leaders remained silent and devoted few resources to educating the public about the disease. In August 2003, I visited one village in Henan where desperate residents had staged a protest demanding better medical care. Local officials reacted by sending not doctors but riot police, who stormed through town and beat up sickly villagers.

Despite such stories, which the foreign media and a few brave Chinese journalists had begun to expose, the AIDS epidemic in Henan barely registered a blip on the radar of the party leadership at the start of 2003. In a nation of 1.3 billion, outbreaks of deadly illnesses were a common occurrence, and the Ministry of Health received reports about them from the provinces every day. But career-minded local officials preferred to handle problems themselves rather than admit they needed help, and if they briefed Beijing on the diseases they were seeing, they were more inclined to downplay outbreaks than sound an alarm. Generally, the central authorities took notice only if a disease caused a serious public panic or represented a threat to political stability. And so, as the government prepared to convene the National People’s Congress in early March—an important session because Jiang Zemin would be passing the presidency to Hu Jintao—the leadership paid little attention to the AIDS crisis in central China, or, for that matter, to reports of another deadly disease that had made its debut in southern China a few months earlier. In party documents passing through internal channels, this other disease was described as an “atypical pneumonia.” Within weeks, the world would know it as severe acute respiratory syndrome, or SARS.

T
HE FIRST REPORT
of the illness to reach Beijing came in January. A chef at a restaurant that cooked wild animals to order in Shenzhen, the freewheeling metropolis across the border from Hong Kong, had come down with a fever and checked into a hospital in his hometown of Heyuan, another city in the southern province of Guangdong. The man was diagnosed with a serious case of pneumonia, but within days, several doctors and nurses at the hospital had also fallen ill. By the first week of January, provincial authorities had sent a team of medical experts to investigate. By the third week, a more serious outbreak had been reported in the city of Zhongshan near the provincial capital of Guangzhou—nearly thirty patients in three hospitals—and a secret bulletin had been sent to the Ministry of Health in Beijing. In their report, the medical experts described a mysterious respiratory ailment, warned that it was “highly infectious,” and recommended that medical workers isolate patients and take precautions to protect themselves, by wearing masks and goggles, for example. It was a report that could have stopped SARS before it became a global epidemic, but the party’s knee-jerk secrecy ensured that it was never widely distributed among the nation’s hospitals. Instead, Beijing sent a team of its own experts to Guangdong, and they returned with reassurances from provincial officials that everything was under control. “We thought it was just high fevers, pneumonia, and a few deaths,” recalled Bi Shengli, a senior virologist in the central government’s Center for Disease Control and Prevention. “We figured they could handle it. We trusted them in Guangdong, because it’s a relatively advanced province.”

Provincial officials immediately imposed a blackout on news about the disease. The day after the medical experts visited Heyuan, the local paper published the world’s first story about SARS under a headline that read “Epidemic Is Only a Rumor.” Officials later acknowledged that their primary concern was the provincial economy. The weeklong Spring Festival holiday was scheduled to begin on February 1, and local businesses were counting on people to spend money. “The most important vacation in the life of Chinese people, the Spring Festival, was coming. We didn’t want to spoil everyone’s happy time,” Feng Shaomin, director of foreign affairs for the Guangdong health department, told my colleague John Pomfret. “You can imagine how people would have reacted if we had told them about the disease. They wouldn’t eat out, nor would they go shopping or get together with family members and friends. If we had done it earlier, it would definitely have caused chaos.”

But if party officials didn’t want to tell the public about the disease before the Spring Festival, they were even less eager to do so after the holiday. On February 10, the Guangdong government announced that three hundred people had been diagnosed with “atypical pneumonia” and five patients had died, but officials assured the world the disease was under control. It was a lie, but all provincial newspapers were ordered to publish it. With the National People’s Congress only weeks away, no one wanted to be blamed for spoiling the picture-perfect ceremonies installing Hu Jintao with headlines about a fast-spreading illness of unknown origin. Even after the congress, the cover-up continued. Now officials were worried about the impact on tourism during the next national holiday, the May Day vacation. It seemed like a bad joke: When is the best time for the party to break bad news to the public? Never.

The Communist Party devotes tremendous resources to the collection and control of information, and the care with which it guards its secrets has been critical to its ability to stay in power. But its institutional obsession with secrecy can also leave it vulnerable. As party officials withheld information about the “atypical pneumonia,” the disease was spreading. And unlike AIDS, it moved at a frightening pace. Doctors and nurses, kept in the dark about the illness and how contagious it was, continued treating people without protecting themselves or other patients. People who developed symptoms didn’t realize how sick they were and didn’t know how easily they could infect loved ones, coworkers, or fellow travelers. During the Spring Festival, millions of migrant workers packed into trains and streamed out of Guangdong. By late February, the virus had struck at least five provinces and crossed into Hong Kong, a travel hub with more than six hundred international flights daily. By the end of the month, it had reached Vietnam and Singapore, and jumped across the Pacific Ocean to Canada.

I
N
C
HINESE, THEY
called them Poison Kings. In English, they were known as “super-spreaders.” It is one of the lingering mysteries of the 2003 epidemic of SARS that certain individuals were prone to accelerate the transmission of the disease, infecting many more people than others who carried the virus. Scientists never figured out exactly why. But by tracking these Poison Kings, you could trace the progress of the epidemic, following the path of the virus from its initial appearance in the cities of Guangdong Province to the rest of China and then the world. One of the first super-spreaders to be identified was a twenty-seven-year-old businesswoman whom I caught up with in May, a few months after the epidemic became a national crisis. She was a frail, slender woman with long black hair, and she asked that I identify her only by her surname, Yu. I met her at night, in a car parked in front of her apartment compound, with her husband, whose surname was Chen, seated at her side. Her eyes were slightly puffy, perhaps from tears, and she wore on the sleeve of her white blouse a black button with a Chinese character, a traditional symbol of mourning.

She lived in Taiyuan, the dreary capital of Shanxi Province, an industrial region in north-central China best known for its abundant coal deposits and mining operations. The city was an epicenter of the SARS epidemic, with more infections than any other in China besides Guangzhou and Beijing, and Yu was an important reason why. In mid-February, she had traveled to Guangdong on a buying trip for the small business she ran trading in jade and jewelry. Before going, she had heard that a strange illness was spreading through the province. Because of the news blackout and the absence of good information, rumors of a “weird sickness” were circulating there and had led to panicked buying of vinegar, herbal medicine, and other items believed effective in warding it off. But Yu’s mother, a Taiyuan journalist, had called a few colleagues in the region and was told there was nothing to worry about. The provincial government, after all, had assured the public that the atypical pneumonia was under control. A few days into Yu’s visit, though, on February 22, she began to feel feverish on a bus ride from Shenzhen to Guangzhou. She thought about going to a hospital, but her husband persuaded her to fly home the next day instead.

Back in Taiyuan, Yu visited one hospital after another, telling doctors that she might have been infected with the atypical pneumonia reported in Guangdong. The doctors had received no information about the disease, and were naturally skeptical. None of them protected themselves when they asked her to cough and listened to her lungs. “They thought it was a cold and gave her normal antibiotics,” Chen told me. “They didn’t have the information about SARS.” Meanwhile, Yu’s fever was getting worse. After a few days, it was up to 104 degrees, and she was too weak to eat. The city’s best doctors were stumped. On February 27, the director of the respiratory department at the Shanxi Provincial People’s Hospital finally moved her into a special ward and ordered staff to wear masks when treating her. By then, though, Yu had already infected at least a dozen people in Taiyuan, probably more, setting off a chain reaction that would hobble the city.

The next day, Chen decided to take his wife to Beijing. It was an easy decision, because the capital was only 250 miles to the northeast and the nation’s best hospitals were there. He and a friend rode with Yu in an ambulance, while her mother and the doctor followed in another vehicle. The trip took nine hours, including a delay caused by a flat tire. Neither Yu nor any of her companions wore masks or other protective gear. They arrived after midnight on March 1 and checked into the People’s Liberation Army No. 301 Hospital, a well-known military facility that had a special ward for senior government officials. Deng Xiaoping himself had received treatment there in his final years. If a new illness was spreading through China, Chen thought, surely the doctors at this hospital would know about it. But he was wrong. The staff at the No. 301 Hospital was as unprepared as those at the hospitals in Taiyuan. The hospital admitted Yu to a general ward with other patients, and the doctors and nurses took no special precautions while examining her. Three days later they transferred her to a private room in the respiratory ward. By then, both of Yu’s parents had come down with fevers. They had tried to hide it, hoping not to upset their daughter, but on March 4, Yu’s mother was admitted to the hospital. Her father flew in from Taiyuan and checked himself in, too.