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作者：Anonymous 在 罕见奇谈 发贴, 来自 http://www.hjclub.org
Leaders Use SARS to Challenge Recalcitrant Parts of Government
By John Pomfret
Washington Post Foreign Service
Sunday, April 27, 2003; Page A33
BEIJING, April 26 -- On April 7, China's premier, Wen Jiabao, visited the
country's Center for Disease Control. The assessment of his visit by the
state-run news media was upbeat.
Wen "stressed that China has the SARS epidemic under control," the state
media reported.
But what the premier really said was something different.
"He talked about the military," a person present during the visit said.
"He said it was wrong that the military was not reporting cases of SARS.
He said we have to start telling the truth to the people. He asked us how
many people had SARS in Beijing. We couldn't tell him."
Within days of his visit, Wen had formed a team of officials led by an ally,
Deputy Health Minister Gao Qiang. The team's task, Gao said later, was to
meet with officials in the Beijing municipal government and go directly
to civilian hospitals to find out the number of SARS cases in Beijing.
At the time, Western news media were aggressively reporting on SARS and
on a coverup of the number of cases in Beijing . The reports were translated
and sent out over the Internet and through short-text messaging services
to mobile phones across the capital.
The quick explosion of information that hit Beijing and other parts of China
created the most significant challenge for China's new government and its
political system in more than a decade. But it also created an opportunity
for Wen and China's new president, Hu Jintao, who came to power on March
19. The two leaders have used the crisis to challenge the authority of parts
of China's government, the military and the capital city's administration,
ultimately challenging the authority of their predecessor, former president
Jiang Zemin.
Another problem involved getting the military in Beijing to cooperate, officials
said. SARS first spread to Beijing at the army's Hospital No. 301 and moved
rapidly to hospitals No. 302 and No. 309. But no one in the military reported
these numbers to civilian authorities in the city.
For weeks, while the epidemic raged in Beijing, city authorities kept information
about its scope from the central government, sources said. "It was as if
an epidemic raged in Washington but was kept secret from the White House,"
said a Western ambassador. Henk Bekedam, the head of the World Health Organization
office in Beijing, agreed. "The center really did not know," he said.
Beijing city officials had many allies in the central government willing
to keep the news from Wen and Hu. For example, Jia Qinglin, former Beijing
party secretary, is on the nine-member Standing Committee of the Politburo.
Liu Qi, the current party secretary in Beijing, is on the Politburo.
"These men knew the extent of the problem, but they have a lot to lose,
so they suppressed information," a Chinese government source said.
Health Minister Zhang Wenkang also was aware of what was happening in the
city.
On March 27, Bi Shengli, a leading virologist in Beijing, warned a senior
official who works in Zhang's office.
"We have disaster in the capital in this new disease," Bi said. "We have
got to do something."
Bi's interlocutor told him that the minister already knew about the problem
but, Bi recalled, "he said, 'We have to negotiate with other ministries
and government departments before anything could be done.' Well, nothing
was done."
"Beijing told the center, 'No problem.' Beijing said, 'We can handle it.
It's a piece of cake,' " Bi said. "The next day doctors and nurses were
pushed down by the disease."
Central government officials said they received more cooperation from the
province of Guangdong, which for decades has had a reputation for unruliness,
than from Beijing. SARS is believed to have originated in the province
in November.
Guangdong officials invited three delegations from the national Center for
Disease Control to the province to look into the SARS outbreak starting
in early February, CDC officials said. Beijing has never allowed the central
CDC to look into the SARS situation, sources said.
"Guangdong respects the center more than Beijing," said a health official.
"Beijing ignores the center."
Around the time Wen visited China's CDC, Jiang Yanyong, the former director
of Hospital No. 301 and a retired surgeon, wrote an open letter accusing
the government of a coverup. He said military hospitals that he had contacted
had more than 100 SARS patients, although Beijing officials were reporting
only a few dozen cases.
The chief of the CDC, Li Liming, seconded the surgeon's criticism, telling
the premier that "if we had controlled the military hospitals at the beginning,
we never would have had this epidemic in Beijing," a witness said.
President Hu, using his position as vice chairman of the Central Military
Commission, persuaded the army to release statistics of SARS patients in
its hospitals.
On April 20, Gao released his preliminary results. Beijing had 346 patients
infected with SARS, almost 10 times the number the ministry had previously
acknowledged. The numbers have since risen to 988 infected and 48 dead.
That same day, the health minister, Zhang, lost his job. He was replaced
today by Vice Premier Wu Yi, the highest-ranking woman in China's government.
In what was described as a "fair trade" by a Chinese government official,
Meng Xuenong, the mayor of Beijing and an ally of Hu, was also forced to
step down.
The pressure on the military will ultimately force Hu and Wen to confront
former president Jiang, government sources said. Although he stepped down
as president in March, Jiang remained as chief of the Central Military Commission.
Until today, Jiang had remained silent on the epidemic. In a meeting in
Shanghai with India's defense minister, George Fernandes, Jiang said that
China had "scored notable achievements in containing the disease."
[China on Sunday ordered the closure of all of Beijing's theaters, cinemas,
Internet cafes and other public entertainment venues in an attempt to curb
of spread of SARS, the New China News Agency reported. The length of the
closures would depend on progress made in combating the virus, the agency
reported.]
Bi, the virologist, worries that despite the new commitment to truthful
reporting, Beijing is still slow to give accurate assessments.
"Once Guangdong realized they had a problem, they began to take bold action,"
he said. "Guangdong moved quickly to tell its people how to protect themselves
from SARS. It also gave money to its local CDC quickly and directly. But
Beijing is very slow."
"We have billions and billions from the center, but I don't know what time
that money will arrive at my lab," he said.
Bi and other experts have said that Beijing officials did not take adequate
measures last week to stop Beijing's huge migrant labor population from
returning home, and thereby possibly spreading the disease across China.
"The government held meetings for hours with no decision and meanwhile,
everybody left town," Bi said. "Beijing is the second peak of the disease.
The third one, in the countryside, will be much, much higher."
作者：Anonymous 在 罕见奇谈 发贴, 来自 http://www.hjclub.org |
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China's Crisis Has A Political Edge(zt)
