The Forbidden City's Disease

The date was June 5, 1989. I was standing in front of the Chinese Embassy on NW Connecticut Avenue in Washington, D.C. Jesse Jackson and his entourage had left, and with him, so had the media hordes who cared what he had to say.

I had been there helping to provide translation for the hundreds of Chinese citizens -- mostly students studying in America -- who had gathered in front of the embassy to voice their outrage at the slaughter apparently unfolding 11,000 miles away in Tiananmen Square. Students who had defied Communist Chinese authorities for weeks by camping in the huge square to demand reform were in the process of being massacred by Red Army soldiers brought in from outside Beijing for the purpose.

The cameras flocked to the publicity-seeking Jackson, who may or may not have been able to find China on a map but parachuted in to voice his risk-free, cost-free outrage. Meanwhile, it was the students watching the media watching Jackson who were showing unspeakable bravery by their presence. By gathering, with each person's face fully visible, in front of Washington's Chinese embassy and the cameras in its windows, these elite students were risking their future, their lives, perhaps the futures and the lives of their families back home -- an act of pure courage and defiance almost entirely unrecognized by the cameramen or passing motorists.

As the vigil settled in, I talked with some of the students, and listened to the stories -- of faculty members and other invisible dissenters who had quietly laid the groundwork for that moment -- some since Mao's death and the Gang of Four in 1976, some since the Cultural Revolution in 1968, some since the Great Leap Forward 30 years previous. They had patiently been working for years for greater openness and freedom, in a climate where millions perished in the government's campaigns of terror. I listened to the stories of this generation of students, risking everything on behalf of those to come. Fatuous media reports to the contrary, the struggle was never for Western- style democracy; it was for greater accountability and openness, but with a system, perhaps socialist, that still provided the social guarantees and paternalism of the Communists. But most striking, mixed with the anger and anguish, were the stories of the future: the quiet certitude that in another 10 years, another 20 -- a few minutes in the historic cycles of a continuous, 5,000-year-old culture -- the next moment would come. Change, and freedom, would come.

Fast forward to today, 2003, and a mystifying new disease is providing a glimpse into our new century -- not just how epidemics will leap continents, but how no country's leaders, even China's, will be able to either control their economy or their people.

As global pandemics go, severe acute respiratory syndrome -- SARS -- is still inconsequential. Only about 3,800 cases, and about 200 deaths, have been reported worldwide thus far. But SARS is new, its origins and transmission mechanisms unclear, a vaccine or cure nonexistent, and sometimes it kills. And so its impact on China, where it has originated, had already been enormous before the stunning apology and admission by Party leaders yesterday that SARS was ten times more prevalent than China's government had previously admitted -- an announcement accompanied by the unprecedented sacking of the Minister of Health and of Beijing's mayor, an enormously prestigious post.

China's Communist leaders have a 54-year tradition of burying reality in an avalanche of Party exhortations, slogans, and descriptions of events barely (and always highly optimistically) related to what actually happened. I earned my antipathy to both Communism and to government euphemisms -- including America's -- by spending entire graduate school months holed up in a library, translating discrepancies in accounts of provincial Chinese economic experiments from Mandarin Newspeak to Mandarin to English.