The Quarantine Blues

The ever-flowing Tsingtao beer was supposed to loosen our tongues. We had been detained while covering peasant riots in the coastal province of Zhejiang, where farmers are terrified that patients with severe acute respiratory syndrome, or SARS, are being quarantined in their midst. Naturally, we didn't want to hand over our notebooks to the irate security officials who could arrest those we'd spoken to for illegally fraternizing with foreign journalists. After a couple hours of unsuccessful interrogation, the local cops changed their tactic: they would forcibly invite us to attend a banquet thrown on our behalf. The copious alcohol was apparently intended to improve our disappointingly meager accounting of our visit.

But two hours into the lavish meal—where we mostly matched their Tsingtao toasts with shots of Coca-Cola—the only people who were beginning to talk frankly were the Yuhuan county officials. They thanked us for giving them an opportunity to enjoy such a lavish meal, showed off their new cell phones—"only $360 for this Motorola," said one, citing an amount equivalent to half a year's net income for a Yuhuan farmer—and began to disparage the panicked peasants in their charge. "Local farmers aren't very well educated," said Hu Hong, a director at Yuhuan's Foreign Affairs Office. "We cannot allow every peasant in this area to know the real SARS situation, because they just won't understand."

So much for China's much-touted new era of openness. For decades, countryside leaders have adhered to a hear-no-evil, see-no-evil approach to crises that has been largely accepted by a pliant populace. But with a deadly disease potentially exploding in the provinces, some of China's 800 million farmers are finally acting out, threatening the social stability that the nation's leaders have long considered their No. 1 priority. Last week, as peasants learned that outsiders possibly exposed to the SARS virus would be quarantined in their hometowns without the locals' consent or knowledge, riots erupted in various parts of the country, from villages near the northern city of Chengde to those in the central province of Henan. The turmoil is the most extreme manifestation of a SARS paranoia fueled by a public increasingly distrustful of government propaganda and fearful that their rulers no longer have their best interests in mind. Intensifying this unease is a vigorous rumor mill that turns careless speculation into doomsday fact. "We don't know whom to trust anymore," says one peasant manning a makeshift roadblock he and his fellow villagers have set up to keep outsiders from entering his hometown. "We have to protect ourselves any way we can."

Few places have been as hard hit as Yuhuan county, where at least four riots occurred in the space of five days last week—despite there being no confirmed SARS cases in the region. For weeks, Yuhuan villagers had to rely solely on inadequate central-government information about SARS, leaving a vacuum in which unsubstantiated local scuttlebutt spread wildly. Beijing and Shanghai officials have efficiently blanketed their cities with SARS information for weeks now. But it was only after the riots started last week that Yuhuan cadres bothered to fully educate their villagers, handing out pamphlets and putting up banners proclaiming "The General Trend Is That We Will Eventually Beat SARS."

Still, some outspoken local leaders are belatedly coming forward and challenging the sanitized SARS picture being presented to the Yuhuan public. When asked whether social order had been restored to Gucheng village, as the government-controlled local newspaper cheerfully reported, a security official laughed and replied: "You are journalists, so you, of all people, should know that what's reported in our newspapers isn't true."

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Indeed, just as local media proclaimed a return to normality, Gucheng was being paralyzed by the most violent riots yet to hit this relatively prosperous village of pomelo farmers. By the time we arrived on Thursday afternoon, citizens were still milling around the village's Communist Party headquarters under the watchful gaze of police. The uprisings had begun on the night of May 3, when word leaked out that six potentially SARS-infected patients from out of town would be quarantined in the party building. Furious that they hadn't been consulted about a decision to isolate possibly contagious patients in a makeshift ward just meters from the local school, dozens of villagers attacked the party headquarters, trashing three rooms and pelting the bureaucrats inside with stones. "I was very scared," says one trapped official. "I really didn't know what else they would do." The riots escalated nightly until May 5, when as many as 1,000 villagers swarmed the premises and overturned the sedans of several local cadres. More than a dozen people were arrested. The official take in the Taizhou Daily summed up the mayhem thusly: "A handful of people who didn't know the truth assembled at the quarantine station to make trouble."

Another conflagration erupted in the nearby village of Xiaomaiyu. Fisherman Lin had been munching on octopus and broad beans last week when he saw a commotion at the fish-breeding pens in front of him. He watched as some 400 villagers attacked an abandoned building that local officials were secretly renovating as a SARS quarantine center. As the outmanned bureaucrats looked on, the peasants forced construction workers to strip the building of its innards. Order was restored only when soldiers stationed nearby arrived. Lin and other eyewitnesses claim the soldiers beat up several elderly villagers; at least four were hospitalized.

"I don't understand how the government can build something like this without talking to us first," says Lin, who offered us a swig of the rice wine-and-beer concoction he's been guzzling to ward off SARS. "They tricked us," adds Shen Xianchang, the caretaker of the converted building. "Even when they started building the isolation wards, they didn't tell us what they were doing." Now, the damaged building is being guarded by resentful villagers. There's only one quarantined person inside, a man who visited SARS-infected Guangdong province last week but who so far has not displayed any symptoms. As we took our leave, he gave us a halfhearted wave from the otherwise deserted third floor.

It was as we were trying to leave Yuhuan county that local officials blocked the mountainous road and told us we needed to undergo a physical, since we were outsiders who could be carrying SARS. But instead of taking us to the hospital, the police drove us to the local Foreign Affairs Office, where 16 officials representing every department from the local public-security bureau to the local propaganda office had gathered. After the drinking marathon proved ineffective, they took us to a conference room for formal interrogation. The procedure was videotaped, with a woman on loan from the local TV station holding a microphone. After much apologizing for having entered Yuhuan county without contacting local authorities—a breach of etiquette for foreign journalists—I was finally ready to write the "self-criticism" statement required of me. In it, I was obliged to promise "not to disclose any information I learned about Yuhuan during my stay here in the near future." (I like to think the "near future" has fully expired by now.)

After the confession session was over, the officials brimmed with charm. They plied us with promotional literature about Yuhuan. Did we know that it was ranked among the "100 Top Counties of China for Rural Comprehensive Force"? Or that this seaside region is "Home of the Famed Shaddock Park of the World"? I assured them I was overwhelmed by Yuhuan's bounty, and they welcomed us back whenever we wanted. Not once did we have our temperatures taken. They can only hope that we weren't carrying SARS.