Control Issues

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Indeed, the danger is that much of China's highly visible anti-SARS activity remains uncoordinated and ineffective—even if it has convinced the public that the government has matters in hand. Beijing's efforts to prevent the outbreak from radiating out of hard-hit areas—critical to containing the disease—are proving porous at best. Although a government directive has forbidden university students and migrant workers in Beijing from returning home, it has been routinely ignored as thousands have headed to the train stations unimpeded. Meanwhile, a newspaper in Hefei, Anhui's provincial capital, reported on Friday that one suspected SARS patient turned up in the city after escaping from a Beijing hospital where he had been put into isolation.

At the Yongdingmen Train Station in southern Beijing, the mixed success of China's preventive measures is starkly apparent. Here, a teenage girl operates a thermal-imaging machine meant to take passengers' temperatures so that possible SARS victims can be identified and quarantined. But most passengers just stride past the machine, and there's little one young woman can do to stop them. At the station's clinic, one of its workers surnamed Zuo didn't even know that migrant workers are supposed to stay put in Beijing. "I just learned how to take people's temperature," she says, holding her new thermometer gingerly. "That's all I'm supposed to do."

With the central government seemingly unable to enforce the domestic travel ban, some villagers have taken matters into their own hands. On a byway of a highway leading out of Beijing, a pair of elderly men guarding entry to their village forced drivers to stop and pay 50¢ each for a spritz of disinfectant on their vehicles. Elsewhere, police and health officials distributed thermometers to travelers and recorded identity-card numbers.

But since infected people can carry the SARS virus for a week before showing symptoms, who knows how many cases have escaped such impromptu dragnets? A migrant last month returning from the capital to his home village in Guyuan county, 300 kilometers outside Beijing, passed on the disease to his mother. She died in a hospital in nearby Zhangjiakou, where 13 others have contracted SARS. Li Tao, who runs a Beijing organization that provides health information to migrants, fears there are many more such cases to come. "Migrants showing symptoms are already going home, because the job sites are shutting down and they haven't been paid," he says.

Beyond the obvious health problems, it is the economic dislocations posed by the epidemic that may ultimately do the greatest damage to the government's credibility. China depends heavily upon foreign investment, which totaled a record $53 billion last year, to build new factories and create jobs for the underemployed, impoverished masses. So far the epidemic hasn't disrupted assembly lines; analysts and representatives for multinational companies operating in China say that, while travel restrictions have temporarily crimped the ability to do business face-to-face, no lasting problems are expected if the epidemic is brought under control quickly. But the mishandling of the crisis in its opening stages has served as a reminder of China's chronic lack of transparency on everything from SARS statistics to the nation's bad-loan ratio—and of the inherent risk of putting too many eggs in the China basket. Although most international companies continue to express confidence in the country long-term, Taiwanese computer maker Acer said in late April that the killer bug had led it to postpone plans to shift its notebook production from Taiwan to the lower-cost mainland.

More ominous is the economic impact faced by the vast majority of China's citizens who work in small-scale service-industry jobs. Restaurants, retailers and other small businesses are being hit hard by the SARS panic because tourists aren't coming and locals aren't spending. They are hard pressed to keep their doors open, let alone pay their employees. According to the government, urban unemployment reached 4.1% at the end of March—a 22-year high. That figure is sure to spike as SARS' economic effect spreads. "In order to have social stability and economic stability, China really needs to have a minimum (GDP) growth rate of 7%," says Fan Jiang, executive director of Goldman Sachs in Hong Kong. Already, some China analysts have slashed their estimates of GDP growth from 8% to 6% for 2003—too low to generate enough new jobs for recent graduates and laid-off workers.

The only bulwark against a wider crisis appears to be the government's determination to vanquish the SARS virus—or at least contain the epidemic to the point that its citizenry can live and work as usual. So far, the public seems to be buying into the government's public-relations campaign. "I've read that once the weather gets warmer, the disease will disappear, so we'll be fine," says Li Tao, a software engineer in Hangzhou in Zhejiang province. Nobody's proved that theory yet, but it's a heartening thought. In the meantime, China's leaders can only hope that by beating the bug they'll earn the confidence they have already inspired. That way, they'll be fine too.