June 2, 2003

The Chinese leadership's recently found fondness for openness brought on by the SARS crisis is fading along with the diminishing spread of the disease on the mainland, according to Sinologist Pierre Cabestan.

China's SARS prevention task force head Gao Qiang's defense of sacked Health Minister Zhang Wenkang on Friday shows China's leaders are intent on avoiding a 'Chernobyl effect,' where debate about official problems in preventing and dealing with the SARS disaster leads to a public questioning of leadership legitimacy, said Cabestan.

Gao told surprised reporters Friday the Chinese government had never underreported the spread of SARS in China and insisted Zhang's sacking in mid-April was not related to any cover-up attempt by the then health minister.

China's secretive Communist Party leadership has not yet publicly explained why Zhang, along with former Beijing Mayor Meng Xuenong, was fired at the same time as the government upgraded overnight SARS infection figures by a factor of 10.

Before the officials' fall from grace, overseas medical experts and journalists and even usually diplomatic World Health Organization (WHO) inspectors in China accused Chinese health officials of deliberately suppressing the figures of severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) infection.

Chinese leaders' prerogative remains promoting social stability by tightly controlling information, said Cabestan, director of the Hong Kong-based French Center for Research on Contemporary China.

Their recently repeated, public assurances promising greater public openness to avoid any future national health disaster like SARS are mostly for show, he added.

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SARS has revealed the biggest abuse of the political system -- the (problem with) officials' responsibility, ' the News Weekly magazine reported Beijing academic Du Gangjian as saying in early May.

Media lies, covering up information and reporting only good and not bad news damages the Chinese government's prestige and the public's trust in it, said Du, a professor at Beijing's National School of Administration.

The right of common people to information is necessary to make governmental policy making 'more transparent and democratic,' Lu, Xueyi, a researcher with the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, was reported as saying in the same article.

Hong Kong-based Sinologist Wang Guogang, however, does not believe widespread debate about SARS at all levels of Chinese society will push China's leadership onto a path of greater information openness.

'The Chinese regime is very skillful in taking advantage of people's wishful thinking,' said Wang, who teaches politics at the University of Hong Kong.

China's leaders have cleverly won international and domestic respect by sacking the health minister and the Beijing mayor, without taking any concrete steps toward greater openness, he added.

Monday marked the first day mainland China recorded no new SARS cases since the outbreak of the disease in China.