Taipei Times: Doomed by a lack of accountability

Tuesday, May 13, 2003, Page 8

'Political accountability cannot be thoroughly implemented under China's party-government system because the party is not responsible to any other organization. Nor can it be supervised by anyone.'


The SARS outbreak has significantly affected China's politics. The international media has mostly focused on the SARS epidemic's impact on the Chinese political situation. But what really deserves our attention is how flawed China's political system has proven to be in the wake of the epidemic.

First, the civilian administration in Beijing can hardly control the military. The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has always stressed the idea of the party leading the military. All troops are controlled by the party's Central Military Commission, chaired by former president Jiang Zemin, rather than by the government system through the State Council.

However, SARS prevention is the responsibility of both President Hu Jintao -- who serves concurrently as the party's secretary-general and the commission's vice chairman -- and Premier Wen Jiabao. As a result, the Hu-Wen system is unable to control the epidemic at military hospitals. This was also a major cause of Beijing's SARS outbreak.

Similar problems will constantly occur, and more than one government will continue to exist in China if it does not have a single leadership that controls both the party and the military in the future.

Second, the central government's control of the local governments is weak. Although Beijing has requested that local governments report epidemic information, the central government does not know whether the reported number of SARS cases is accurate. Hence, it has to send out teams, or even rely on World Health Organization (WHO) experts to find out the truth for it.

The central government also has to constantly threaten to dismiss those irresponsible officials and has no idea whether it will receive complete information on the epidemic nationwide.

Third, the party's control over the media is tight. The spread of the disease is generally believed to be related to the regime's cover-up of the epidemic at first. In fact, all the media are led by the party's propaganda department.

The regime is absolutely capable of completely blocking certain news if it desires to do so. On the other hand, for more sensitive news that is not officially banned by the department, the media usually report it to a certain degree in an effort to boost sales. Reports on the SARS epidemic were blocked until early last month.

The media's simultaneous reactions served as proof of the department's ban on SARS reports earlier. If the party still does not give greater freedom to the media in the future, and the media still cannot give full play to their function as an early-warning system, then similar disasters may break out again.

Fourth, both information feedback from rural areas and public resource management mechanisms are poor and ineffective. The disease has not yet spread into the rural areas, where medical resources are lacking. But numerous workers are now running away from big cities to their hometowns on China's crowded transportation system.

The public health system has lagged far behind in the rural areas because of long-term ignorance and unbalanced development. Both the epidemic information and public medical resources are insufficient. Once massive outbreaks of the illness take place there, all cities are likely to close down. This will further worsen the gap between China's urban and rural areas.

Fifth, the legitimacy of the regime is weak. Why did China cover up the epidemic at the beginning? The bureaucrats were afraid to cause public panic and social uproar. This clearly showed the fragility of the country's overall political order. On the other hand, many economically developed areas tried their best to maintain a clean image, so as to avoid possible capital outflows and economic strikes.

This clearly showed that China's overall political legitimacy excessively relies on the single factor of the economy, which is another weakness of the Chinese political order today.

Sixth, government officials at all levels have a bureaucratic attitude and do not value the public's lives and property. For example, a Chinese official once said that it's not considered a significant matter unless hundreds of thousands of people are killed.

Maybe the Chinese government would not be so nervous if not for the large number of foreigners also affected by the disease. Numerous people have been killed in coal mine collapses in recent years. Although these incidents were reported by the media, they did not cause any political crisis because all the victims were lower-class Chinese.

Finally, the most fundamental problem: party-government relations and "political accountability," which were reflected in the following cases. Take Guangdong Province for example. In March and early last month, divergent voices on SARS propaganda were frequently heard from the provincial government and the provincial propaganda department, which is in fact controlled by the party's propaganda department. The former tended to be more open, and the latter more conservative.

Such divergence created a political accountability problem: the provincial government had to bear the political responsibility of concealing news but had no real control over the local media. This highlighted the difficulty of how "political accountability" should be promoted in the existing party-government system.

If the government at each level is responsible to the National People's Congress of its level and also to the State Council, then how can the party be supervised?

Since the party's organization and management principle is "democratic centralism," which demands that local party organs obey the central ones and that lower authorities obey higher ones, should the party's propaganda department be responsible for local propaganda agencies' actions? To which is the propaganda department responsible? To the Central Committee?

The problem is, those who lead the party's propaganda work and the government's administration are all members of the Political Bureau under the Central Committee. But the bureau adopts a collective leadership. How can responsibility be clarified?

Political accountability cannot be thoroughly implemented under China's party-government system because the party is not responsible to any other organization. Nor can it be supervised by anyone.

According to the PRC's Constitution, especially stressed by Hu when he first took the helm, the party has to act in accordance with the Constitution. But the Constitution failed to stipulate any supervision mechanism for the party.

In the era of globalization, the essence of China's new political and economic order is fluid in nature. In light of the SARS impact today, the political system built on the basis of a closed society in the past is seriously flawed.

For China's healthy development in the future, it's time for the new Chinese leadership to add political system reform to its agenda.


Hsu Szu-chien is an assistant research fellow in the Institute of International Relations at National Chengchi University.

TRANSLATED BY EDDY CHANG