Economic Times: Disruption In China as SARS Expands

By: Harvey Stockwin

May 7, 2003

HONG KONG: As China's SARS epidemic slowly expands nationwide, the Chinese Communist Party is responding with a massive media and propaganda campaign, and numerous local communities are taking the law into their own hands as they seek to prevent the disease from devastating them.

Beijing remains the epicentre of the Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS) epidemic, and has now fared much worse than Guangdong province where SARS originated last November. While new SARS cases in Beijing continue to increase by leaps and bounds, in the southern Guangdong province the number has obviously peaked and is slowly moving upwards. So far (as of May 6) Beijing has admitted 1,897 SARS cases causing 103 deaths with only 121 patients recovering. In Guangdong by contrast there have been 1,453 cases causing 54 deaths but no less than 1,245 patients have recovered and been released from hospital.

Three other provinces and one municipality, all close to Beijing, are developing epidemics of their own. Shanxi province already has 360 SARS cases and 14 deaths, while the numbers are also rising in Inner Mongolia (230 - 14) Hebei (107 - 6) and the port of Tianjin (109 - 5). Suprisingly, the city of Nanjing today placed 10,000 residents under compulsory quarantine even though the city has so far had only a handful of SARS cases.

Beijing continues to take draconian steps in an effort to further limit its contagion. All places of entertainment remain closed. All schools have been closed for another two weeks. No less than 16,000 persons have been ordered into quarantine, either at home or in special facilities. All water reservoirs around Beijing have been sealed off in an effort to make sure that no SARS virus enters the water supply -- even though there is no evidence yet that the SARS virus is water borne.

Around Beijing, and in neighbouring Hebei province, numerous villages have tried to prevent Beijing persons and cars from bringing the virus to their communities, either by mounting a road-block or even by digging trenches. Small riots have taken place, and buildings have been trashed at several places where the authorities have sought to utilize them for the quarantine of SARS patients.

At a different level, some districts of Shanghai have sought to impose a compulsory 10-day quarantine on all arrivals from places (in and out of China) in the grip of SARS infection. They were overruled by the municipality, but Hainan island and several other provinces have opted to try and do the same thing.

Since it ended its cover-up of the SARS infection two weeks ago, the CCP has mounted an old-style media and propaganda campaign which seeks to concentrate the attention of all citizens on the glorious battle which the party is determinedly waging against the evil SARS forces.

The "heroes" of this battle are endlessly extolled in the belief that by concentrating public attention on future victory, the masses will forget past failures and current inconveniences. So far, as local communities take the law into their own hands, the campaign has also revived divisive conduct reminiscent of the Mao Zedong's disruptive Cultural Revolution.

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