In November 2002, a viral disease called Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS) started to spread in southern China. Chinese cities of Guangzhou and Hong Kong were most affected, followed later on by cities in Taiwan, and the northern Chinese city of Beijing. The virus carriers, mostly people who thought they were affected with a very strong strain of flu, spread the virus across the world. Because the Chinese government did not timely report on the disease, the disease spread rapidly in Bejing, and to some nearby northern Chinese provinces as well. Some "super carriers" would infect over one hundred people. By March 2003, thousands in mainland China were infected, but only those infected in Hong Kong received full reportage. The rest of China reported dozens of cases, and used terms such as "well under control." No one would know that this would become one of the turning points for Chinese Communist Party Chairman Hu Jintao and the Chinese premier Wen Jiabao, both newly appointed in September 2002.

The outbreak of the disease had a tremendous impact on China in reform. Since 1978, Communist China has embarked on a road of turning coastal China into an international manufacturing center. Enormous amounts of foreign investments in China helped make this possible. China has also relied on its tourist industry to make money. If the government allowed an honest report of the SARS virus, as Hong Kong did, it could have a tremendous adverse impact on foreign investments and tourism in China. Political and media transparency, however, almost always comes at a cost to economy and those in power in democratic countries, such as the current debate within the U.S. on whether Iraq really has weapons of mass destruction. Although the proof of its absence would severely tarnish the credibility of the Bush administration, many Republicans as well as Democrats believe it is important to clarify that, because democracy is more important than taking the party line on one issue. A democracy, through exposure of the various scandals, e.g. Enron, Lucent, Hullyburton, Martha Stewart, often shoots its economy in the foot, but in the long run, such periodic shootings in the foot prevents the need for massive bleeding and revolutions.

By early April, a senior Chinese doctor who treated SARS patients in Beijing decided to tell the truth. Instead of the "dozens" of SARS patients, there were hundreds of them in Beijing, he said in a letter sent to a Chinese TV station, a Hong Kong TV station, and the New York Times. He was quoted in the New York Times but not reported in the former two channels. The World Health Organization came to inspect SARS patients in Beijing and questioned the Chinese government if they were underreporting. At this juncture, the Chinese government headed by the new technocrats Hu Jintao and Wen Jiabao decided this was the moment to test their capability and to reveal to the outside world their intents and positions, a chance that they could not afford to miss. On April 20, they did the unprecedented thing of firing the Chinese Minister of Public Health Zhang Wenkang, and the mayor of Beijing Meng Xuenong, for covering up the SARS epidemic in China. Firing cadres of such senior levels was unprecedented in Chinese Communist history if we do not include the Cultural Revolution. Political transparency and media transparency on this issue, Hu and Wen realized, would affect China's credibility in the international realm in the long run. Short term covering up of the SARS epidemic in China would destroy all that China had gained in its international image, which would militate against foreign investments in China and tourism in the long run. Besides, establishing media transparency on this critical issue would also help promote the new image of Hu and Wen as pushing China's reform from the economic realm more to the political/cultural realm. Following the firing, Hu and Wen adopted strict measures to govern the city of Beijing, e.g. segregating SARS patients from regular patients in hospitals, eventually putting all SARS patients in several hospitals reserved just for them. Putting strict regulations on others' lives so they would not venture out too often to reduce the chances of infection. There were daily reports on the number of new SARS patients. The disease came under effective control in Bejing and Hong Kong by June 2003. No new cases have been reported in both places since mid June. In the southern Chinese city of Guangzhou the disease came under effective control a month earlier. The WHO concurrs with the statement by China.

What is interesting about the administration of Hu Jintao was that he seemed to use the new popularity he built up among the people through his resolute control of the SARS epidemic to further certain radical policies that led him to break with his predecessors on several important points. One thing he did was to allow the capture of the wealthiest man in Shanghai, Zhou Zhengyi, because of Zhou's extreme corruption, including bribery and false documentation of his company's profits to help him borrow money from Chinese banks. It is rumored that Zhou, a private merchant, was able to do all this because his arch supporter was Jiang Zemin, the recently retired Chinese Communist Party president, who was supposed to have shielded several very corrupt officials, and who himself had sons that were very corrupt. Jiang's retirement was the result of a new implementation of retirement among the most senior cadres in the Communist system. Although Deng Xiaoping did "retire" officially before his death, his "retirement" was spent mostly in managing Chinese politics from backstage. He was able to do it because of his clout, something the current Chinese Communist leaders, who joined the revolution in the 1940s and 1950s, do not enjoy. Zhu Rongji, the former Chinese premier who worked almost single handedly to get China into the WTO (World Trade Organization) and who also retired September 2002, was supposed to have been responsible to oust Zhou Zhengyi the Shanghai swindler because he used to be part of Jiang's group. From the ousting of Zhou Zhengyi, some people see a new political alliance between the current Party president Hu Jintao and former Jiang Zemin clique member Zhu Rongji.

Besides tackling the issue of corruption, Hu Jintao did something else, about rural migration to cities. The policy passed recently, to suspend a previous law that migrants without a resident card can be apprehended by the police and forcibly sent back to their hometown, was triggered off by a specific event. In May 2003, a college graduate and migrant, Sun Zhigang, went to the southern Chinese city of Guangzhou to look for a job. He was detained by the police because he had no residency card, and beaten to death by inmates in jail. This led to a national uproar because it touches on a sensitive issue: the household registration system. That system used to control people's physical mobility through the rationing system. Now that the rationing system is gone, it has lost much validity. Still, migrants are required to present their residency cards wherever they go to work and in some big cities, they need to apply for a temporary residency card, or face deportation. Millions of Chinese a year are deported back to their hometowns for lack of a temporary residency card (the application for which is costly) of the cities where they went to look for job. While the new policy passed does not directly address the issue of rural migration to urban areas, it calls attention to better treatment of the migrants.

Upon his inauguration as Communist party chairman, Hu vowed to reduce the gap between the urban and rural, the coastal and inland regions in his tenure. During Jiang Zemin's tenure as president of the Communist party since Deng Xiaoping's retirement from the early 1990s to 2002, Jiang had focused on the development of Chinese economy in the coastal regions, under Deng's slogan that some people should be allowed to get wealthy first. Some people have become enormously wealthy. But the gap between the wealthy and the poor has also enormously expanded since the Cultural Revolution. Glaring dispalys of wealth and poverty not only exists in different regions, but in the same cities where the rural and urban, the wealthy and poor, congregate. A recent report from a newly minted journalist from the prestigious Fudan University of Shanghai shows this. This was his from his summer internship in Shenzhen, a city right across from Hong Kong, one of the four "special economic zones" opened up for foreign investments in the 1980s, and still a very commercial and international city today. Because of its proximity to Hong Kong, many from Hong Kong come to Shenzhen for their weekends. The young journalist works in a modern high rise that faces the Shenzhen golf course. One interview of food poisoning, however, got him into the other world in Shenzhen. Here, the factory workers made 2 Chinese yuan an hour (about $0.25) and they need to deduct the time they spend on going to the bathroom. In fact when they go to the bathroom they need to find someone to substitute for them before going. When the journalist interviewed the boss of the factory, someone from Taiwan, the boss tried to give a bag of cash to him so the report would sing praises for him. Another time, the young journalist pretended to be a migrant worker in order to interview migrant workers. The bunch he interviewed, largely veterans who came to Shenzhen to attend a seminar on how to be a salesperson and spend 4300 Chinese yuan (about $530) on a cosmetic package and the title salesperson for that brand of cosmetics, lived 28 people to a room, sleeping on the floor, with only one light and a small electric fan. They seldom turned the light on because they could not afford the electricity. But even as it was, because these prospective salespeople had no temporary residency cards, they were raided by the police and caught. All their efforts and money wasted. When the young journalist returned to the newspaper where he interned, he saw a farm woman crying and begging, promising to marry (sell herself to) any one who could pay for her husband's treatment of urine poisoning. She was then dragged to the police because of illegal entry into the newspaper office. (www.wenxuecity.com, June 25, 2003)

Hu Jintao vowed to reduce the gap between the urban and rural, the rich and the poor, reducing scenes that are mentioned above. Of course, the cities in recent years also face many problems, such urban unemployument that has reached about 10 per cent. Many college students such as the young journalist above have great difficulty finding a job. China's population certainly is one reason for this difficulty. Hu faces enormous responsibility and severe challenges ahead.