Crushing an Epidemic.

Every morning, residents of Beijing's Yonganli neighborhood gather in the concrete plazas scattered among their apartment buildings to begin the day with calisthenics. Recently, someone has been keeping a close eye on who shows up and who doesn't, and it's not the fitness police. It's Sun Shuqing, a 50-year-old retired factory worker who is the neighborhood's Communist Party-approved busybody. "We're so used to everyone going outside to the courtyard in the morning that if we see someone doesn't come out, we go get information," she says, cheerfully explaining how she and 100 other volunteers have been asked to report on residents with possible SARS symptoms. If a neighbor informs her someone is acting funny--and many have been more than willing to do so- -Sun grabs her thermometer and pays a house call.

Stunned by a deadly new disease that has killed more people in China than anywhere else in the world--more than 270 by mid-May--the nation's Communist Party has mobilized millions in a "people's war" against SARS that recalls the mass political campaigns favored by Mao Zedong. Taking a page from the same playbook used to crush "capitalist roaders," democracy activists and the banned Falun Gong spiritual movement, the party has activated a vast, hierarchical network of loyalists that penetrates every classroom, apartment building and workplace--and directed it against a new kind of enemy: a virus. A 30-year-old driver in Yunnan province says he's terrified of how people have reacted to the government's broad call to arms: "It reminds me of what I've heard about the Cultural Revolution." People across the country are manning "fever checkpoints" and refusing to let strangers pass, scrubbing down cars and taxis, even imposing quarantines on friends and relatives with the slightest sniffle. Local officials have sealed off entire villages and euthanized countless pets. Last week Beijing threatened to execute anyone who intentionally spreads the disease.

To outsiders, the "war" looks like overkill. But China's unorthodox approach to fighting SARS just might work. The pace of the epidemic has slowed significantly in recent weeks, with the government reporting fewer and fewer new infections daily. Meanwhile, in democratic rival Taiwan, the contagion appears only to be worsening. Which raises the question: is an authoritarian government better equipped to squash an epidemic than a democratic one?

Traditionally, political scientists argue that democracies are better than dictatorships at preventing disasters, be they famine, flood or pestilence. A free press, an active civil society and elections that hold officials accountable to the public all help ensure that governments prepare for the worst and act quickly when it comes. Indeed, it was the rigid, top-down nature of the Chinese political system, which for months treated SARS as a secret to be covered up, that allowed the virus to flourish. But this same obsession with control may now give China an advantage against the disease. "A highly authoritarian regime can enforce a lot of measures, particularly at the grass-roots level," says Stephen Morse, director of the Center for Public Health Preparedness at Columbia University.

And the Chinese government has snapped people into action. In Hang- zhou, volunteers are disinfecting the city's 953 bicycle rickshaws daily. In Shanghai, authorities are giving out cash rewards for those who rat out the neighbor with the bad cough. In Beijing, one neighborhood is raising thousands of yuan for families of doctors and nurses, hailed as "angels in white coats" in a SARS-inspired jingle that has become the theme song of the ...