efore atypical pneumonia, before the Metropole Hotel super-spreader, before the World Health Organization (WHO) advisories on travel to China, there was the visa mystery.

Long before China declared publicly that it faced a medical emergency in severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS), American businesses knew they were facing a different emergency of unknown origin.

Last August 16, I wrote to the leadership of the US Department of State (DOS) that American companies working in the People's Republic of China were facing sudden, unexpected, and disruptive changes in procedures governing the issuance at US posts in China of visas for PRC citizens seeking to enter the United States for purposes directly related to legitimate US commercial interests.

The Council's corporate members were unable to learn the content and extent of the new procedures that seemed to be operating. Normal business functions in the large and expanding arena of US-China commerce were, and still are, severely challenged.

Nearly a year has passed since the visa mess insinuated itself without notice into the normal operations of American businesses—and universities, research labs, student exchange programs, and other forms of American interaction with the world.

In contrast, two and a half months have passed since SARS burst onto the world stage. Today, while uncertainties remain, the SARS tide appears to be receding. There can be little doubt that the energetic actions of governments at the local and national levels, along with the strenuous efforts of international health agencies led by the World Health Organization (WHO), have been crucial to stemming the epidemic.

On the visa mess, however, progress toward the restoration of balance is far less clear. US companies engaged in normal trade and investment with China continue to report that Chinese citizens on legitimate business missions are finding the process of securing normal US travel documents impenetrable, unpredictable, inordinately time-consuming, arbitrary, and more frequently negative where once it was otherwise.

The cost of this systemic implosion is clear to the affected individuals and businesses, whether the firms are small or large. A snapshot of the damage inflicted on smaller US companies by the visa mess was offered at a recent hearing by the House Small Business Committee. So far, other congressional committees with more direct jurisdiction over the entire visa process have failed to confront the visa problem, either in regard to China or globally.

Viruses and visas are different issues, of course, but some of the contrasts in the two situations are instructive.

The central contrast between the US and global responses to SARS, on the one hand, and the continuing visa meltdown on the other, lay in public authorities' approach to public information. Faced with the SARS crisis, national health authorities in the United States and many other nations leapt, together with the WHO in Geneva, into the work of hard science and of instant, sustained public outreach.

The authorities quickly informed health workers and the general public across the globe about what was happening and what could be done. (China was, as noted in my last Letter, slow to act, but then acted with energy). A whole set of policies and measures—especially the rapid deployment of information resources—are at the core of the decline in SARS numbers worldwide as summer begins.

Contrast the visa mess.

The visa crisis emerged in the wake of September 11, 2001. The impulse to act immediately to strengthen US border security was both understandable and necessary.

That the response was also profoundly bureaucratic and heavy-handed was perhaps, at first, inevitable. It also carried heavy political freight. As the attempt to rationalize and strengthen the management of US border security got going, DOS, which had always held authority over the granting of visas, came in for withering political criticism for having granted visas to people bent on committing terrorist acts against American citizens within the United States. In due course, heads rolled in Consular Affairs. Junior officers handling visas heard a loud and clear message.

Furthermore, a tightening of border security revealed massive technical obstacles, including the existence of numerous bureaucratically distinct databases whose integration across agency lines now loomed as critically urgent. The government turned simultaneously to the tasks of institutional reorganization (including the formation of the Department of Homeland Security), technological rationalization, and tighter restriction on access to the United States.

Although details remain sketchy even now, it is clear that the visa process underwent massive changes in the early summer of 2002. A new program called CONDOR raised the bar for visa applications by certain citizens of certain countries and territories deemed to present the highest risk of terrorist infiltration into the United States. That was the bluntest new instrument deployed in the visa system.

China, however, was never regarded as a special source of potential terrorist infiltration into the United States. On terrorism, the United States has consistently regarded China as a cooperative partner.

Yet, by midsummer of last year, visa applications from Chinese nationals directly associated with American business operations in China were disappearing into a void, an opaque US review process with no explanation of what was happening and when decisions would be reached.

The kind of competent informational effort so quickly evident in the SARS case was regrettably absent in the case of the visa mess. For months, businesspeople and Washington-based organizations like The US-China Business Council probed politely, wrote letters, and talked to friends in government, simply trying to understand what had befallen them. Answers were often friendly, usually vague, never definitive.

It became clear that the big slowdown on China visas resulted from the vast increase in referrals from consular posts worldwide to an interagency "Security Advisory Opinion" (SAO) review process in Washington. We learned some other things along the way:

The "clock," as it was called—the familiar system whereby, in the absence of a formal decision on a particular visa application within a fixed period of time, the application was automatically approved—was unplugged. No time limit on the review of visa applications was retained. Thus reviewing agencies no longer felt a strong incentive to act expeditiously.

In early August, 2002, a new "guidance" was sent to consular offices worldwide, updating the wide-ranging Technology Alert List (TAL) on which visa officers were to focus and counseling them on when to reach out for a multi-agency SAO instead of making their own visa decisions. This guidance, called "Using the Technology Alert List (Update)" makes clear the confluence in midsummer 2002 of the emergency response to terrorism and longer-term challenges, such as "maintaining US advantages in certain military critical technologies." This program of interagency visa review, established years earlier, was called MANTIS. For China, it was not CONDOR but MANTIS that was now at the forefront.

Recommending that the so-called "critical fields list" attached to the update be "posted at the interview window where staff can become familiar with the contents," the update also encouraged visa officers to trust their instincts. "There may be times," visa officers were advised, "when the consular officer suspects for whatever reason, that an applicant may be /of concern/ despite the absence of the applicant's profession or area of study on the TAL. Such cases can and should be submitted in an SAO for the Department's advisory opinion." (Emphasis added).

With the antiterrorism border-control effort (not aimed at China) thus melded with the broader goals of the MANTIS-TAL process by August of 2002, and visa officers urged to "trust their instincts" by moving visa decisions to interagency review, it is no surprise, in retrospect, that the number of MANTIS review cases for China quickly shot upwards, to perhaps four times prior levels.

Draped in the emergency response to September 11, the mysteries of the visa crisis remained unsolved to those, including a great many legitimate American companies in China, caught in the downdraft. Well-intentioned officials would explain obliquely that decisions were coming from "above." Sympathetic listeners would point out that the manpower in the embassies, consulates, and overburdened investigatory bodies in Washington was lacking, as were the technical resources: computers were ancient, systems did not interconnect, administrative priorities were elsewhere, and so forth.

Once it becomes clear who has the authority to repair this extraordinary bureaucratic flameout, balance simply must be restored to a visa system that must shut the door as tightly as possible to those who seek to destroy the security of the United States while keeping the door open to foreign citizens, including Chinese, whose entry into the United States is inoffensive or beneficial to this country.

The SARS emergency to date has demonstrated the capacity of national and international government agencies to respond vigorously, creatively, openly, and effectively to sudden dangers.

The visa mess has not done so.

If current SARS trends continue, Americans pursuing opportunities for successful business with China will soon flow in and out of China again in normal numbers. Meanwhile, they wait none too patiently for normality to return to the flow of Chinese customers, business partners, and employees to the United States. Whether the bureaucratic systems struggling to perform essential security tasks can develop the skills needed to minimize random damage along the path to protection is a critical question that demands an answer.