SARS is about to get in my way. Yesterday, the WHO has changed Taiwan’s status from “limited local transmission” area to “affected area”. Following up, the US center for disease control and prevention put Taiwan on its travel advisory list.
As I mentioned in an earlier posting, I was due to present at a conference on “Internet Chinese Education” in early June but I now am beginning to seriously doubt whether it will take place. I can’t get through to the conference web page and have gotten no reply to an inquiry to their staff.
The SARS epidemic, tragic deaths notwithstanding, has led to a slew of interesting developments in Asia, which we can all happily ponder once we get through it. It has led to, among other things, unprecedented action on the part of the Chinese government against a minister and a mayor, to an unprecedented change in position by China on Taiwan’s relationship to the WHO, where Taiwan has been trying to get membership for years, and resulted in draconian efforts in many countries to control the disease.
There is lots of talk about the fact that there is little legal infrastructure in place to legalize the curbing of rights that such efforts entail, although this is less of a problem in places like Singapore and China.
The epidemic will probably lead to at least a temporary flourishing of distrust and suspicion, in some cases racially based. For example, I have seen talk (think it was a NYT article) of Beijing neighborhoods labelling themselves as “clean” and preventing entry to strangers, and we have heard occasional mention of US and European distrust of anyone who looks Chinese.
Of course, there are also huge economic impacts to this, which no article on the issue goes without mentioning. A decree from WHO, that little harmless organization now run by a former Norwegian prime minister, warning against nonessential travel can now equal a death sentence for some aspects of an economy and provoke aggressive responses, as in the case of Toronto (eventually they were removed from the travel advisory).
Taiwan was getting off fairly easy, with only a few cases, but things have gotten considerably worse. There is a good article at the Asia Times on the recent developments there.
The biggest issue, which many articles on the web recently have been good to point out, is that SARS may be tragic and spreading, but the real epidemic is the fear of the disease. The fear of the disease is what will really hurt the economies, and lead to irrational and sometimes racist behavior even when the actual risks are low. As a friend of mine who left Beijing only days ago after working there for three years said, “They are still spitting in the streets, and only a thousand or so people of many million are affected.” However, as he also pointed out, the fear of the disease affects everyone. If things get worse in Asia without significant spread to other areas, I worry that an indiscriminate disease like SARS will be associated with Asians, in the same way AIDS was associated, foolishly, with the gay community. Like so many other precedents, this leads not only to further spread, but reinforce existing prejudices that may not have surfaced.
Fear on this scale can do little in the short term, but if it continues, fear has a historically powerful ability to create huge changes, and not all for the better. Sometimes it results in blind trust of any institution that commands legitimacy (the WHO, local law enforcement, health care, and the government in general) so that abuse of power and poor decisions can have exceptionally broad consequences and widespread effects under the banner of, “We must take action now”
This of course, counts both for epidemics like SARS and the US’s “war on terrorism”
However, in the long run fear can also develop into powerful force against entrenched authority when combined with anger over failure. Some believe that a realization of this lies at the source of sudden and decisive action by the Chinese government to reverse its previous secretive and uncooperative stance on the disease. Then again, others claim that it was merely because the disease had seeped into the inner halls of Zhongnanhai, Beijing’s center of power.
Regardless, instability, anxiety, and surprise all await. Let us hope that the worst case scenario, a massive but silent spread of the disease through rural China, is avoided and others can join the celebrations and award ceremonies held recently in Vietnam when the the WHO announced they had effectively contained the disease.
All I can do is wait to hear about the Taiwan conference…