From the WSJ Opinion Archives
THE REAL WORLD
The Red Plague
How communism gave us SARS.
It's spring, and for China's regime that means it's time to send out the annual bullying letters warning off any nation that might be tempted to back democratic Taiwan for observer status at the World Health Organization.
Right on schedule, China's mission to the United Nations in Geneva has been hand-delivering a letter in recent days to missions friendly to Taiwan. China's official letter proclaims that Beijing's rulers have "always cared for the people in Taiwan." The letter goes on to warn that Taiwan's desire to participate as an observer at next Monday's opening of the World Health Assembly in Geneva is "immoral," and for any nation to table an invitation to Taiwan's democratically elected government would be a "grave violation" of U.N. rules, deserving, in Beijing's view, "the condemnation of the international community."
What sets this year apart, however, from the last six times Beijing pulled this stunt is that China's rulers have brought us SARS. Taiwan, now fighting not only China's propaganda campaigns but the China virus itself, has every right to full membership, not just observer status, at the WHO. But at China's behest, Taipei remains an outcast, granted no status beyond the graces of two WHO experts who have been taking care, during their stay in Taiwan, to avoid all contact with the officials who run the place.
These are just a few of the perverse ways in which China's rulers export their deep political sickness to the world, and it is no coincidence that China's secretive state system has now helped incubate a literal and horrible disease. By the time SARS seeped beyond China's borders to infect Hong Kong and Taiwan, and spread as far as Australia, India, Canada and the U.S., it had a lively start. It may yet become the first global pandemic of the new millennium. The WHO's official toll stands at 7,447 cases, with 552 deaths; the Asian Development Bank estimates the disease could cost Asia alone as much as $28 billion. These numbers may fall well short of the total damage when all is done. They sound accurate so far only if you are prepared to believe that in the teeming city of Shanghai--far less equipped to stop disease than, say, Toronto--China's official totals of seven SARS cases and a single death are accurate.
Beijing's apparent infighting over SARS has prompted talk that we are now seeing another of those fabled power struggles. Former unelected president Jiang Zemin, now cast as the bad cop, is presumed to be tussling with his unelected successor, Hu Jintao, cast in this round as the good cop. The truth is that all Communist Party members who have a hand in the command of China are complicit in the system. And they still fail to grasp the principle that tyranny is wrong. They seem chiefly sorry not that they run a repressive state, prone to breed and spread trouble, but simply that in this case, they could not hide it.
But if SARS has failed to impress upon China's tyrants the links between liberty and health, there is plenty the rest of us can learn from the context in which China has been exporting disease to the world. Let's start with a joke now making the rounds on Chinese Web sites: You remember Baghdad Bob, the Iraqi Minister of Information? Don't bother looking for him in Baghdad. He's got a new job, in Beijing, doing the SARS briefings.
Why would anyone think that's funny? Well, apart from the WHO itself questioning China's SARS statistics, and the anecdotal evidence suggesting the virus may be far more widespread than Beijing officialdom has said, there's the angle that China's regime has spent decades providing incentives for its citizens to lie to officials and to utterly mistrust what might loosely be called the healthcare system.
That's not solely because salaries are so low, and incentives so twisted, that the quality of surgery in China is widely described as being a direct function of the size of the bribe paid to the surgical team. There's also the matter that China's government has for years poured medical resources into the state's one-child policy, with its penalties, forced abortions and sterilizations.
In recent years, enforcement has been breaking down, thanks both to the power of bribes and the ability of China's increasingly mobile population to evade the authorities. This, a China-born demographer tells me, has produced an underworld of pregnant women on the lam, a class significant enough to merit its own name in Chinese slang: Chaosheng youjidui, or "birth-quota-breaking guerrillas."
Add to this scene the plight of China's Falun Gong practitioners, many of whom took up their beliefs in a quest for physical and spiritual well-being denied them by China's system--only to find themselves persecuted, imprisoned or forced underground. State-provoked guerrilla habits of hiding one's personal life make it that much harder to halt the spread of a threat such as SARS.
China's regime runs a system, of course, in which the primary imperative since Mao's 1949 communist revolution has had very little to do with protecting the people and everything to do with ensuring the prosperity and power of the party elite. One recent product of China's health-care arrangements has been the spread of AIDS via hideously irresponsible techniques such as collecting blood for plasma and then retransfusing pooled, processed blood back into donors, in some instances infecting entire villages. When a brave Chinese doctor, Wan Yanhai, blew the whistle, China's authorities jailed him for disclosing state secrets--until world outcry proved too embarrassing.
In China's climate of fear, perverse incentives and sheer slop, accurate information would be a great asset. But Beijing specializes in jailing, disappearing or exiling reporters who expose unpleasant truths. Courtesy of the U.S.-based Committee for the Protection of Journalists, you can download a list of 39 journalists currently imprisoned in China for such "crimes" as writing about corruption.
Among these detainees is a South Korean photographer, Jae Hyun Seok, arrested this past January while trying to document the desperation of North Koreans who had fled into China, where Beijing's official policy is to deny them refugee status and send them back--often to terrible punishment or execution. That puts China's authorities in gross breach of the U.N.'s 1951 convention and additional protocol on refugees, which China has signed--but neither the authorities of China nor those of the U.N. seem bothered by such details. China's big lie about North Korean refugees is that they are all "economic migrants," as if fleeing starvation were just one more business option.
There are so many official big lies in China that one needs the talents of a Baghdad Bob to keep them all straight. But along with the North Korean refugees, the jailed journalists, the birth-quota-breaking guerrillas, the early SARS sufferers, the thousands of unknown inmates of a vast gulag or laogai system that serves to silence those who would tell the truth about China, there's yet another tale that deserves attention, especially in light of China's early efforts to hide SARS. I refer here to Beijing's official claim that it has no biological weapons programs. Should we believe that one, too? The possible existence of such a program is worrisome not only for what it would suggest about weapons China's rulers might be willing to use, or sell, but also as a potential source of accidents that China is poorly prepared to contain.
According to a former deputy chief of the Soviet biological-warfare program, Ken Alibek, who defected to the U.S. in 1992, it would be unwise at this stage to dismiss out of hand the possibility that SARS might be a weapon that leaked from a lab. Mr. Alibek, who spends his time these days on issues of U.S. biodefense, notes that in 1982, when he worked in a Soviet lab that was weaponizing a nasty disease called tularemia, the local rodent population became infected by accident. In the case of China, and SARS, Mr. Alibek, well-versed in the pathology of weaponized diseases, tells me "I would never rule out this possibility."
The point is not that we know the genesis of the SARS virus itself. We don't. What we do know is that the season has rolled around again for the World Health Assembly to convene in Geneva. And lest democratic Taiwan finally gain entry, it is time for China's ambassadors once again to instruct the world in the politics of health. And that is truly sick.
Ms. Rosett is a columnist for OpinionJournal.com and The Wall Street Journal Europe. Her column appears alternate Wednesdays.
