As China begins to bring the SARS epidemic under control, the Communist Party is seeking to claim credit for defusing a crisis caused partly by official denial and deceit.
The leading government news media have hailed the fight against SARS as a "baptism" that gave rise to a new sense of unity around the country.
"This smokeless war has been a classroom in which we have felt and forged a national spirit," China Youth Daily said in an editorial this week.
But some scholars and media commentators say SARS did more to expose the weaknesses of China's political culture than its strengths.
They say the panicked reaction of people around the country, the chaotic flight of migrant workers from Beijing and other big cities, and the tendency to rely almost exclusively on the central government to fight SARS exposed the fragility of China's social order.
"This war against SARS has been totally dominated by the government," said Xu Jilin, a history scholar at East China Normal University in Shanghai. "If a society faced with a crisis can only passively depend on government control, this in itself represents a latent crisis."
The frank debate about the government's handling of SARS, unusual in a society that generally discourages open discussion of sensitive topics during an emergency, comes as the anxiety about the disease has begun to ease.
While the daily toll is higher than it has been for several days, officials are increasingly expressing confidence that the worst is over and that the disease can abate in the near future.
The returning sense of normalcy has prompted scholars to present a wide range of assessments in the official news media and popular online discussion forums. While many agree that the government deserves credit for limiting the spread of SARS, even some government-backed media commentators say the effort should not be viewed as a clear-cut victory for the party-led system.
`Habitual behavior'
China Economic Times ran a front-page commentary on Thurs-day emphasizing the errors made by the authorities in combating SARS, including "delaying, hiding and preventing exposure in the press -- habitual behavior under this system."
Referring to the dismissal of the health minister and the mayor of Beijing late last month, the article said, "Only when two senior officials were dismissed was there a turn for the better."
At issue for other critics is the revival of the Communist Party's old-fashioned apparatus of control. Neighborhood committees, work units and village-level governments have been empowered to isolate travelers from SARS-infected areas, enforce quarantines on people suspected of having contact with SARS patients and tutor people on how to wash their hands, dispose of their garbage and otherwise practice good hygiene.
Though such grass-roots party structures have at times been mobilized during periods of political unrest, such activity largely faded into history with the rapid growth of China's market-oriented economy in recent years.
The propaganda machine has also been operating in overdrive. Television news is full of maudlin homages to health-care workers, referred to as "white-coated warriors" and "angels in white." President Hu Jintao (
While some critics say the all-out campaign has had some positive effects, they say it also undermines efforts to make people take more responsibility for themselves and their communities.
During the SARS crisis, the government and the party have been issuing orders on details like how to provide food for people in quarantine and how hospitals should charge patients in rural areas who seek SARS treatment.
Individual initiative
Individuals and communities ought to be able to handle such matters without following an official script, many say, arguing that individuals will never take the initiative if the party keeps asserting its primacy.
"The previous model of social governance by an all-powerful government is already hard put to cover a society which is flowing at high speed," said a commentary in The 21st-Century Economic Herald. "It is difficult to rely simply on the government to penetrate every cell and capillary of society."
Xu, the historian at East China Normal University, argues that China's response to the crisis compares unfavorably with the way the US coped with the Sept. 11 attacks.
The terrorist bombings stoked patriotic spirit around America and prompted people to support New York, Xu said. He said the SARS crisis, in contrast, had splintered Chinese society.
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