Mother Nature: Political Reformer

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What scares you more, SARS or terrorism? For me, it's the disease, though I'll concede to a bias: I spent part of last week in Toronto, where commuters are now worried about whom they're sitting next to and where a favorite bar of mine--packed when I was there in February--is now as empty as the Yukon.

The problem isn't just the virus, which has traumatized at least two other cities: Beijing and Hong Kong. What's especially nerve-racking is the cover-up at the source, in the corridors of power in China. Hu Jintao, who became leader of China's Communist Party half a year ago, now has to manage the country's biggest internal political crisis since the 1989 massacre at Tiananmen Square. After Beijing's initial efforts to hide the severity of crisis, Hu will have to step nimbly to protect the party's authority--and his career.

Once upon a time, outbreaks of disease and environmental catastrophe could be swept under the rug. Man-made famines in Russia in the 1930s and China two decades later were scarcely known outside their borders. But more recently the world has become too interconnected for deception of that magnitude. In 1986, when a nuclear reactor exploded at Chernobyl, in Ukraine, the Soviet government initially tried to keep it quiet. But when Geiger counters in Scandinavia went haywire, Moscow had to come clean. This year the truth about SARS emerged after citizens infected in China traveled outside the country--and after the groundbreaking reporting of TIME and other international publications.

China still has a long way to go. Beijing even now has been less forthcoming than the Soviets were during their crisis 16 years ago. Mikhail Gorbachev finally admitted that Chernobyl was a disaster (with some caveats, to be sure) 18 days after the explosion; Beijing is still being less than honest about SARS, unless you really believe that, as of last week, there were just two cases of the disease in Shanghai (pop. 17 million). Chernobyl eventually helped promote positive change in the Soviet Union as citizens grasped just how awful the system had become. Gorbachev realized that "even if you wanted to be Stalin, you couldn't anymore," says Michael Mandelbaum of the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies. Within months, the Soviet leader accelerated his perestroika and glasnost reforms, which speeded the collapse of Soviet communism. In China, Hu sacked the health minister and Beijing's mayor. But it still isn't clear whether he and other top officials truly understand that a free flow of information is critical to a healthy society, to free markets, to long-term prosperity. "The leadership wants the country to be an economic power without changing the political system," says Wu Guoguang, a former party official now teaching at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. "But it is realizing too late that the two go together."