One word I thought I may have overused when writing about the epidemic is unprecedented. But it’s really the only word to describe what I am seeing during my final days in Beijing. Only a few hours ago the government held a two-hour, live press conference broadcast on national television. Trust me, it is a very, very rare occurence for this government to hold an open press conference of any kind– but live? Nationally broadcast? For two full hours, with international reporters hammering them with tough questions? Unfuckingprecedented.

But that’s just for starters. Now the Health Minister and the mayor of Beijing have been demoted, which is equivalent to their political crucifixion — remarkable, considering all the praise the governmnent has heaped on the national health ministry for its glorious handling of SARS. But that was last week, when it was okay to tell blatant lies. This is big news, a sign that the government is scared shitless of not taking drastic action to show the world it’s not totally evil. (Too late, in my book, but we’ll soon see how it goes down with the rest of the world.)

Wait — there’s still more. Next week is one of the “big three” full-week national holidays China celebrates each year. The government today canceled (or postponed) the entire holiday, another unprecedented move. The economic and psychological consequences are immeasurable. We are viewing history in the making here in Beijing, all brought about by a nasty variation of the common cold.

This press conference is amazing. I hope they show the entire thing on the world’s TV screens. The questions are merciless, the rulers are squirming. The NY Times has a pretty good article on today’s — yes, unprecedented — events. But you really had to be here to feel just how amazing the government’s turnaround is, adjusting, with a straight face, yesterday’s figure of 37 infected in Beijing to 339. You also have to be here to see how creepy this whole thing has become. You have to see all the masks and the taxi drivers wearing gloves and people refusing to meet with others under any circumstance (my Chinese tutor has canceled our last two lessons for this reason). It is truly historic, both the anxiety level and the upheavals it is causing within the normally unassailable, uncriticizable government. I am kind of sad that I will be moving out of Beijing at such an exciting and bizarre time. It is definitely going to be material for a stranger-than-fiction book.

Big White Guy, I’m sorry but I couldn’t resist borrowing this — the photo and the caption — from you:

“Just look carefully, I only want you to look carefully. Do not repeat the lies of liars. Do not become like them. Once again, I blame the WHO for reporting before it ascertains what takes place. Please, make sure of what you say and do not play such a role.”

More than any other article I have seen so far, this one backs up my own observations about the Chinese government’s contortions over the past weeks, from idiotic, bold-faced lies (“there’s never been a better time to visit Guandong, and tourists are arriving in record numbers!”) to stern warnings to tell the truth about SARS. It’s a great piece. Excerpt:

China’s top leaders, seeking to quell an international uproar over the honesty of their medical reports on a deadly respiratory virus, have issued their strongest warning yet about severe acute respiratory syndrome and have explicitly cautioned officials not to cover up its spread. ….The top leaders called the spread of the new disease a serious threat to “China’s reform, development and stability” and said that party and government leaders around the country “will be held accountable for the overall situation in their jurisdictions.”

But the tactic appears to have backfired, with official credibility demolished and rumors gone rampant.

Sarswatch is doing an extraordinary job of filtering and collecting the latest information on the disease, chronicling the story as it unfolds worldwide. Especially noteworthy and disturbing was its coverage yesterday of yet another story from Time Asia. Needless to say, the government here is blocking access to the article, doubtless for our own well being, but Sarswatch gives us the entire thing with an informative preface:

Time Asia is reporting that earlier this week, Hospitals in the Chinese capital hid SARS patients from international health officials. In an amazing story, Time details how patients were moved to other hospitals, moved to hotels, and even driven around Beijing in ambulances, all to avoid the WHO inspection team. They are also reporting that internal memos say there have been 100 new cases of SARS in Beijing in the past 10 days, even as the official count remains at 37

Is everyone getting this? Read that snippet again (I had to, because it’s hard to believe). Can you imagine the paranoia that would manifest such insanity? Read the whole article; it’s another eye-opener.

Shocking column by Maureen Dowd on Bush’s buddy who intends to Christianize Iraq. Here’s a taste:

Franklin Graham, the Christian evangelist who has branded Islam a “very wicked and evil” religion, was the honored speaker at the Pentagon’s Good Friday service. After Kenna West, a Christian singer, crooned, “There is one God and one faith,” Mr. Graham told an auditorium of soldiers in camouflage, civilian staffers and his son, a West Point cadet: “There’s no other way to God except through Christ. . . . Jesus Christ is alive because he is risen, and friends, he’s coming back, and I believe he’s coming back soon.”

….Muslims suspicious that America is on a crusade against Islam were inflamed to learn that Mr. Graham is taking his missionary act to Iraq. They are still scorched by his remarks to NBC News after 9/11: “It wasn’t Methodists flying into those buildings, and it wasn’t Lutherans. It was an attack on this country by people of the Islamic faith.”

It was exactly this thinking that led to the rounding up and interment of the American Japanese after Pearl Harbor, one of the sorriest moments in America’s history. How can Bush endorse such a person?

I am packing up my stuff and preparing to leave Beijing so I can’t spend a lot of time writing. I wanted to clarify my post yesterday about universities closing. I am singing in an international chorus here, and one of the singers is a professor at Peking University (Beijing Daxue, or “Bei-Da”). He told me that rumors were flying last week about two professors dying of SARS and 20 students being infected as well. In truth, he said, he knew of one professor for sure who died of SARS and that he could say with a good amount of confidence that at least 10 students were infected. All classes have been cancelled. I realize this is “hearsay,” but you have to understand that in Beijing, which until a few days ago was insisting there were a total of only 27 SARS cases in the city, hearsay is all we have. (I won’t repeat rumors here until I think my source is a good one.) This same professor said that earlier this week it was announced to the students that they must be ready at any time to leave the school and go home. Two students of Bei-Da who are in the same chorus confirmed this.

Last night, a German businessman I know from work called and told me he came to Beijing all the way from Yunnan to give a lecture at a local university and that, to his shock, “the university is closed.” He said cities outside of Beijing have no idea how seriously SARS is affecting the nation’s capital. He said he was leaving right away for Yunnan, where there have been few if any cases of SARS reported.

These pieces of anecdotal evidence were the main reasons I posted that Beijing was “going crazy.” That, and the frenzied and very visible efforts to disinfect every surface in the city. I still think there’s a lot of over-reaction that could have been avoided had the government been forthright from the very beginning. (That will be the day.) Now, after the damage has been done, after weeks of telling us the disease was under control and tourism was rising, the central government is doing a complete about-face and talking nonstop about the “grave threat” of SARS and what it’s doing about it, threatening “severe punishment” to any officials caught covering up cases of SARS. (All I have to say is, Physician, heal thyself.)

This is a defining moment for China and it will be interesting to see where it all ends. All of that work over all of those years, all that propaganda about the new China, the more open society — so much of it was built on sand, and the SARS tidal wave washed it away overnight. As someone who gives crisis management training to executives, I will forever refer to this as a classic case study in exactly what not to do in a crisis. No. 1 rule is acknowledge it, set up a system for sharing information, make yourself available and tell the truth. If you do not, it will catch up with you, always. The “new leadership” (which is as fossilized and plutocratic as those before them) gets an F minus in crisis management and, in the eyes of the world, will be sitting in the corner wearing a dunce cap for a very long time to come.
[Edited, 4/20]

Beijing has gone utterly crazy. All the universities are either closed or on the verge of closing. It’s a one-topic town. Unprecedented.

Looking back at that last post a few hours later, I am a bit in shock; I don’t usually use such strong language, and it just sort of….appeared. Maybe I needed to say it before I say goodbye to China, to get that out of my system. If anyone’s offended, apologies in advance — but I still think what I wrote is true. I’m just worried about hearing knocks on my door at 2 in the morning…

[Note: I have edited and retitled this post, which started off as an update on SARS, but ended up more an indictment of my host country’s inherently wicked government. TPD, April 19]

I was intrigued to see the NYT article today on how the Chinese government’s mishandling of SARS has totally demolished its painstaking efforts to position itself as a fast-changing, dynamic society that is moving closer and closer to liberalizing its laws, its policies and its general philosophy. You must read this article in full to understand just how grievously China has damaged itself with this fiasco.

There is no doubt that in some ways China is changing, especially in regard to trade and economic policy. There have also been some baby-steps in the right direction when it comes to education (problem solving is slowly being encouraged, not simply “chalk and talk” memorization). But what SARS has shown the world is that for all the fireworks, for all the self-congratulatory praise we see on CCTV and read in China Daily about “the new China,” politically the country is rotten to the core, atrophied and senile.

The article wastes no time getting to the point:

China’s restrictions on information about a highly infectious respiratory illness has undermined five years of diplomacy intended to alter its image as a prickly regional power and to improve relations with neighboring countries, Asian politicians and analysts say.

Beijing’s secretiveness for much of the last several weeks about severe acute respiratory syndrome, or SARS, contrasts sharply with the openness of its neighbors, even one-party states like Singapore. It also reflects the emphasis China puts on overall social stability above individuals’ well-being, many argue.

That last sentence contains the keys to understanding this strange nation. The obsession, to the point of insanity, that the government places on “social stability” and “harmony” makes this government an enemy to its own people. To ensure social stability and harmony, the fundamental necessity is to look good. This is a government that lives to make itself look good, so that people remain placid and accepting of (or better still, oblivious to) the shit going on around them.

Worried about a new catastrophic disease that could kill your citizenry by the thousands? Don’t give it a second thought — the Chinese plutocracy has the ideal answer: Don’t do anything. If you say nothing, you might be able to contain it. Taking that awful risk is far more attractive an alternative than informing people, and in so doing creating “disharmony.”

Now, any sane, rational government knows that contagious diseases don’t give a flying fuck about Mao’s Red Book and won’t be contained in just one village because Jiang Zemin wants them to be. But let’s give them the benefit of the doubt for a moment and assume the Chinese leaders are not totally brain damaged. Let’s say they really believed this sort of wishful thinking might work. After learning that this policy was an absolute disaster — in fact, a tragedy of unimaginable dimensions for millions of Chinese citizens — wouldn’t they then know at least not to do the same thing again?

Normally the answer would be yes. But this is no normal government. This government did the exact same thing for nearly 10 years with AIDS, ignoring it, stigmatizing those infected, and setting up every conceivable obstacle to creating awareness and preventative measures for its people. Its people, for whom this government supposedly exists. Ha. (For reference, see what I wrote just a few days ago on the AIDS holocaust here in China.)

In other words, they learned nothing from their repellent “see-no-evil” approach to AIDS, which now threatens to turn China into the next Africa in terms of AIDS infection. The audacity, the sheer hubris of these pompous oafs who, as SARS began to spread through Beijing were lauding one another on television and clinking champagne glasses for the farcical rubber-stamp “People’s Congress” — these bastards knew, and they did nothing, just as they did nothing in the late-80s as contaminated blood flowed into the veins of its citizens across their vast nation, sentencing innocent men, women and children to a lifetime of stigmatization and the guarantee of death without dignity. Acknowledging the tragedy may have made them look bad, and we can’t have any of that now, can we?

They knew. And they said nothing. Fifteen years ago, and today. And you wonder why I am hard on the Chinese government?

As I prepare to leave this country, I worry less and less about telling the truth. To say that another way, I have always tried to tell the truth here, but often I felt I had to tone down my rancor, soften the blows. Right now, I just don’t care, and I want whoever happens to stop by this little site to know the truth about China, or at least what I perceive that truth to be: China is the Evil Empire, a tottering, power-drunk, paranoid nation of thugs dressing themselves up as saviors — a bad country. It was for the bastards we saw smiling and waving at the “People’s Congress” that my God made hell.

Any questions?

Footnote: I refer only to the Chinese government here. The people I know here are gracious, kind and good. They know, to a large extent, what their “leaders” are all about. Luckily for these good people, the SARS fuck-up has been of such great magnitude that it could end up resulting in long-term change and improvement here. Maybe. It has certainly opened the eyes of the world as to what “the new China” is all about.

Extreme anxiety hits the city as a rumor spreads about two students at Beijing University dying this week of SARS. (Friends of mine insist it is true — these are responsible, adult people but who knows?) A Westerner in my office, married to a local woman, heard it from his wife last night and he, too, believes it. “You wouldn’t believe how students live on Beijing campuses,” he told me. “They live in dorm rooms with as many as eight guys, jammed in like cattle. It’s the perfect breeding ground for disease.”

As I said, it’s an unvalidated rumor. But this I can state as fact: All of a sudden they are disinfecting Beijing like there is no tomorrow. I went to the bank today, and two workers with buckets were scrubbing the counters and the floors and the ATM machines. I went back to the hospital and this cleaning frenzy was visible everywhere you looked, the floors, the seats, the doors, every surface was being scrubbed and the smell of disinfectants hit you in every corridor.

It’s definitely a different city than it was a week ago. Business is grinding to a halt (in my industry, anyway) as more and more of the multinationals send their foreign staffs back home. Just today the US embassy put out a notice suggesting that US citizens consider foregoing trips to China until the situation has been improved. Concerts and shows throughout the city have been canceled, as no one wants to sit in close proximity to others. I was laughing a few weeks ago when I went to Singapore and saw several passengers on my plane wearing surgical masks. Now as I get ready to travel to south China I’m pretty sure I’ll be wearing one as well, at least on the plane.