Death Becomes Them: What SARS says about China, and us.

The French prime minister, M. Raffarin, has restored the reputation for courage of Frenchmen everywhere: He visited Peking at the height of the SARS epidemic, taking a personal risk that even warriors such as Messrs. Blair and Cheney declined to take, preferring to postpone their scheduled visits till healthier times. "This psychosis irritates me," said Raffarin before his departure; he wasn't letting a tiny virus get in the way of large orders for Airbus.

Not that the risk he was taking (and that Blair and Cheney were avoiding) was very great. As Le Figaro pointed out, he was staying only 30 hours, and would never leave his grand hotel except to go to a scaled-down banquet attended by a few high-ups. The Chinese took care to disinfect every inch of ground he traversed, even if that disinfecting more resembled a medieval warding-off of the plague by means of vinegar, herbs, and incense than it did a scientific medical procedure.

At the time of Raffarin's departure, 39 people had died in Peking, a city of 14 million inhabitants, of the 774 confirmed cases of SARS recorded there: not exactly an epidemic of Black Death proportions -- if, that is, the Chinese figures are to be believed. Aye, there's the rub, as Hamlet would have said. For in the revelations of the Communist party's protracted and no doubt continuing lies about the extent of the epidemic, what dreams may have come of a more open and democratic China? Whether these dreams should give us pause remains to be seen. When strong but brittle structures break apart, they often shatter into dangerous splinters.

Perhaps the most historically significant thing about this epidemic will prove to be not the number of people who died in it, but that it forced the Chinese Communist party -- which still rules a sixth of the world's population -- publicly to admit for the first time that it is not infallible, that there is a truth independent of its own assertions and will, and that its trusted functionaries are capable of the most barefaced and self-interested lies. These are uncomfortable things for caesaropapist regimes such as China's to admit.

That it should have been an epidemic of relatively minor proportions that forced these admissions on the Party is also significant. As epidemics go, SARS is as yet pretty small beer. True, no one knows where and how it might end, but the fact that it seems at present to kill only 5 percent of those it affects, and that those 5 percent are mainly people already debilitated by other diseases, suggests that it will have practically no long-term demographic effect, even should it become much more widespread (and more contagious) than it is now. The average winter flu epidemic in Britain alone kills at least 16 times as many people as SARS has so far killed.

Moreover, it is not as if the Chinese Communist party had no other skeletons in its cupboard, public revelations about which would tend to damage its claims to intellectual infallibility and moral legitimacy, even in the minds of its most ardent supporters. Indeed, just as the epidemic itself is (so far) a rather minor one, so the cover-up about it has been rather minor, by comparison with other cover-ups for which the Party has -- understandably, given its terrible history -- been responsible. After all, the famine that followed the Great Leap Forward was probably the worst in all of human history, and the orgy of cultural vandalism during the Cultural Revolution was the equal of anything achieved by Lenin and Hitler.

Any party or government that claimed to be in apostolic succession to Mao Tse-tung must, by that very fact alone, be utterly lacking in moral scruple: so that it is straining at a gnat after swallowing a positive caravan of camels to complain now of Peking's lack of candor about the small matter of SARS. Even democratic governments have managed bigger lies in their time: Have we forgotten that Ibsen wrote a play on the very subject of the denial of an epidemic for political and economic reasons not very far removed from those in the present situation?

So why all the fuss now, and what does it signify? In the first place, there has clearly been a change in the sensibility of the Chinese themselves. After a couple of decades of frantic economic growth, probably unequalled in the annals of history, the Chinese -- at any rate, those Chinese who count: a minority no doubt, but nevertheless a very large number -- are no longer content to be, nor can be cowed into being, blue-clad workers in a hive, expected to place no special value on their own individual lives. Growing consumerism has taught them that what they want counts, and that therefore their existence is of more importance than was dreamed of in Mao's philosophy (and practice). No longer units in an army of forced labor, and moreover increasingly in possession of the means to exchange information -- and misinformation, and rumor -- that the government can no longer control, they are now given to panic when their individual existence seems to be threatened. Peking has been turned into a ghost city by a mere 39 deaths (let us multiply and call it 390), when only a few years ago a million deaths would have made as little impact on it as a stone on a pond.

Second, there is now an international dimension to the question that once would not have counted for much as far as China was concerned. China, though still culturally and socially less accessible than nearly any other country in the world, nevertheless is no longer hermetically sealed. It is not an autarky: It now needs the rest of the world, and the world's good opinion, so that its economic progress might be maintained. The Chinese regime realizes that it cannot prevent genuine information as well as rumor from seeping out, and therefore the old methods of more or less blanket denial and straightforward lying -- "There have been only 39 cases in Peking and they all came from other provinces" -- will no longer serve. An appearance of increased openness, if not the thing itself, is therefore necessary, hence the sacrifice of the mayor of Peking and the minister of health. If a government dismisses liars, surely it must be attached to the truth? Along with the government's new openness, however, comes an increased willingness to take drastic authoritarian measures to try to contain the epidemic, whether those measures are scientifically justified or not.

The episode casts a certain light on us, too. For the fact is that we have demonstrated ourselves to be vastly more concerned about a minuscule statistical risk to our own health than we would be about any political outrage in China, whatever its scale. We don't really care what the Chinese do to each other, as long as they don't give us potentially fatal diseases. Genocide in Tibet would harm their trade and foreign investment far less than 21 deaths in Toronto. This is a timely reminder, in case we needed one, that foreign policy is about interests far more than it is about principles: Try as we might, we are always more anxious about ourselves than we can ever be about others.

Still, our panic is not very edifying to behold. It is the panic of people unfamiliar with death, who believe that death is for others but not for ourselves.