Unhealthy Politics.(China's leaders response to SARS)

Macfarquhar is the Leroy B. Williams Professor of History and Political Science at Harvard University.

China's SARS epidemic has its Communist Party leaders on their heels. Not since the 1989 student uprising in Tiananmen Square has its leadership been so exposed to the humiliating glare of international scrutiny and criticism. The cancellation of prestigious conferences in the capital and the potentially precipitous drop in foreign trade and investment as foreigners obey the World Health Organization's advisory to shun Beijing are embarrassing enough. Worse is the image of China's leaders behaving in feckless fashion, putting politics before people.

The leadership's perennial obsession with secrecy led it to prevaricate about the extent of the disease in the capital for five months. The rationale seems to have been a desire to avoid public panic during the passing of the torch to new leaders at the Party Congress last November and the National People's Congress in March. But in truth, the party has always carried the "hear no evil, see no evil, speak no evil" policy--preferred by bureaucrats everywhere--to extraordinary lengths. The assignment of the 2008 Olympic Games to Beijing augured for many China's arrival in the modern world. But the SARS epidemic has revealed the early-20th-century Leninist paranoia that still infects the behavior of China's leaders, and the Third World nation that lingers behind the glittering skyscrapers of Beijing and Shanghai.

The public-health crisis is also beginning to pull back the curtain that hides the divisions within the party itself. Clearly, the honeymoon is over for the new leaders, President Hu Jintao and Premier Wen Jiabao. Whether praise for the energetic measures they have taken to contain the epidemic ultimately outweighs blame for concealing it will doubtlessly depend on the human toll SARS exacts. The public- relations battle will be fought out partly through the ubiquitous urban Residents' Committees, the asphalt-level apparatus through which the party confronts its subjects. But for China's leaders the popular mood will be of less consequence than the factional struggle within the party.

When Hu took over in March, he did not inherit the full panoply of China's leadership posts. His predecessor, Jiang Zemin, retained the key chairmanship of the party's Central Military Commission. Jiang also seeded a significant number of his "Shanghai faction" in the ranks of the new Politburo, orchestrated by his main trusty, Vice President Zeng Qinghong, a brilliant political operator. At the time Jiang gave every appearance of leaving office reluctantly, and having bowed to necessity he --seems determined that his faction should preserve his legacy in the people's eyes as the third member in an apostolic succession--Mao, Deng and Jiang.

Today, when ...