Letter from the President: Out of Nowhere -- CBR May-Jun 2003

Letter from the President

he sudden arrival of Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS) on the world's radar screen brings home a central fact. In an information-drenched world filled with information-accustomed people, the failure to provide information conveys its own message. And the failure to deliver information can have major consequences, both for the withholder and for those from whom the information is withheld.

The evolving SARS crisis crosses paths with the international business environment at many points and already touches US-China relations in many ways. There is no need to dwell on the implications of disrupted business travel, effects on the airline and hospitality sectors, or estimates of GDP impacts; the media can take care of those.

Let me choose one theme in particular: the underground river of fear of foreign contamination that many societies, including the United States and China, normally keep within a narrow channel, but which periodically threatens to breach its banks.

One of the grittier subthemes that sometimes runs between nations is this theme of contagion, of noxious emanations seeping from one country and one people to another, endangering the most treasured foundations of the threatened land.

One thinks, for example, of the uneasiness with which many countries around the world have viewed the arrival of American cultural influence, particularly since World War II; the attempts to defend home-country language against imported new vocabularies from the United States; the attempts to guard home-country moral values against the perceived creeping degeneracy or amoral materialism associated with American commercial and economic power; the desire to preserve native faiths from the depredations of a value system perceived to be motivated by religio-political conversion; and most recently, the growing anxiety of many nations over the ultimate motives and intentions of the US superpower.

The United States, for its part, has long been uneasy over foreign "invasions" or contaminations. Generally speaking, the visceral American phobias of an earlier era have receded as the world has shrunk and as America's vision of itself has become more cosmopolitan. But vestiges remain, in the anxieties of many Americans about floods of foreign products into the US market, floods of illegal immigrants into American society, the dangers of "Asian" influenza or of contaminated farm products from south of the border, or the specter of terrifying plagues from Africa, or foot and mouth disease from Britain.

China, too, presents examples. Sometimes these latent American fixations, in the hands of political opportunists, have manifested themselves in ugly demonstrations of nationalism, racial prejudice, or crude economic discrimination. Some contemporary examples are just silly, at least superficially.

Last year, I found amusing, for example:

One that got away/Chinese walking fish turns up in Maryland....(Houston Chronicle, 07/05/02)

A panel of scientists recommended poisoning a pond that has become home to a breed of carnivorous Chinese fish to make sure the fish don't escape and spread through Maryland's waterways....(AP, 07/20/02)

Or, take the mitten crab:

What has furry claws, tears up fishing nets and brings nearly $40 a pound in Queens? The answer—and the subject of an unusual federal complaint—is the Chinese mitten crab. ... a native of waterways near East Asia's Yellow Sea. The crabs spawn in salt water and can migrate hundreds of miles up freshwater rivers, bypassing dams by walking on land. (AP, 07/31/02)

Then there is the familiar litany over defective products. This clipping happens to be from England:

Poison warning over China's billions of bootleg cigarettes. A quarter of all the cigarettes smoked in Britain are thought to be counterfeits produced in illegal factories in China using the sweepings of workshop floors. (Sunday Telegraph, 04/14/02)

And finally, in this brief review of the flamboyant, sometimes scurrilous evocations of China's menace, with a long, long pedigree in the annals of American prejudice, illegal immigration:

Ten Chinese men who waded ashore naked on a southern California beach were being questioned by immigration officials on Friday after failing in an attempt to blend in with locals by changing swiftly into dry designer jeans and baseball caps. In one of the more bizarre attempts to gain illegal entry into the United States, the men were rounded up on or near beaches around the town of Newport Beach after being spotted emerging from the chilly ocean around dawn by Coast Guard officials and partying teenagers. (Reuters, 05/24/02)

Americans—and citizens of all nations—have a lot to be vigilant about, in terms of our susceptibility to casual acceptance of the imagery of contamination, whether it stems from the purposeful efforts of entrenched domestic economic interest groups or from the pandering purveyors of paranoia on a thousand websites, whether it attaches to products or to people.

That is why the early days of the SARS outbreak have been so troubling. In a matter of weeks, as of the time of writing in mid-April, the world has come face to face with a disease previously unknown to science, of uncertain cause, uncertain transmission vector, and unknown treatment. The world is suddenly awash in news report and rumors, all infused with the fear of an unknown danger originating, it seems, in the southern part of China.

What was fascinating, and worrisome, about the bursting of SARS onto the public stage was the absence of information about the disease from within China until long after the crisis was unmistakable to the world, and China's lurching commitment to greater frankness thereafter. Whether or not the early reports last fall of an outbreak of "atypical pneumonia" in South China, and the disease's subsequent disappearance from view, told the whole story of what was happening in Guangdong is not yet known. What is known is that until early April China was silent about SARS, even as the trails of contagion apparently connected the rising number of sufferers outside of China with those "affected centers," as the World Health Organization refers to them, within the PRC.

One of the unfortunate coincidences of the SARS outbreak is that it has come at the very moment when new leaders have taken the stage in Beijing and throughout China. As China and the world wait and watch for indicators of what kind of leadership this will be, the real indicators will come not from academic analyses of leaders' educational backgrounds or industrial and administrative careers; they will come from the leadership's response to the sudden and inevitable adversities that greet every new government, in every country. SARS is that first great adversity.

In its inescapable challenge to entrenched patterns of information management—after all, whether China publicly confronts the disease or not, the business travelers aren't traveling, business conferences aren't convening, shoppers aren't shopping—this biological occurrence presents China with both "danger," and "opportunity," as the Chinese word for "crisis" (weiji) implies. The danger is that China's silence in the face of what is obvious to the rest of the world compromises more broadly China's external credibility and in fact will contribute to that sense of ominous threat discussed above—a fear that is at once visceral and unthinking, unjust and immoral.

The opportunity is that China, in the face of an unfamiliar and thus far undeterred medical emergency, by sharing once-restricted medical information with the global health community and its domestic audience, can take its next great step on the path to global citizenship, rebuild international confidence in its official information, and take a leading role in the battle to defeat a global lethal menace. Many who have worked with China over the years hope that the cloud that has formed around the SARS emergency in the PRC will have that silver lining.

Lest this essay be taken as an affront to China's dignity, let me hasten to add: no country, and especially no government, is free of the taint of information control, and precious little information is completely neutral. Companies pay astronomical fees for public relations services, remembering the disasters of past mishandlings of sensitive information. Interest groups and advocacy organizations package the facts for their own needs and goals. Political figures do likewise. Governments everywhere are loath to air their dirty laundry or contribute to social unease. Americans have seen this behavior up close on many occasions.

The effects of biological emergencies on established institutions of governance are not completely predictable in any society. But an informed populace clearly is crucial to the struggle to combat such challenges. Silence is no longer an option. That was the lesson of the late twentieth century. Let it not be the hard-learned lesson of the SARS outbreak in China, Asia, and the world at the start of the twenty-first.

May-June 2003 THE CHINA BUSINESS REVIEW

Last Updated: 05-May-2003