CHINA/Analysis: China is now paying for the scandalous half-baked reform of its health system, writes Jasper Becker in Beijing.
Finally, Chinese leaders have been caught red-handed lying about basic facts and one inevitably wonders what else they have been misleading the world for the past 20 years.
While it is good that they are belatedly grappling with the SARS crisis, the real question is what salutary lessons are they going to draw from this? It is too early to tell if China's new leadership led by the General Secretary, Hu Jintao, will grasp this opportunity, as Mikhail Gorbachev used the 1983 Chernobyl nuclear accident, to push for political reforms.
The arbitrary sacrifice of two senior party officials, Beijing mayor Meng Xuenong and health minister Zhang Wenkang, punished for simply obeying orders, is not necessarily a good sign.
Meng and Zhang hid the real numbers about SARS patients because the party believed it would stay in power by hitting high economic growth targets and nothing must interfere with that. They were unlucky to get caught and that was only because there happened to be one honest doctor, Jiang Yanyong of the People's Liberation Army Hospital 301, who dared to speak out.
It is more than likely that this will only encourage other regional leaders in cities like Shanghai to do better in lying and cheating. That is how things have always worked out in the past; think of the 1958-1962 Great Leap Forward famine where officials thought showing loyalty by falsifying harvest figures was more important than saving lives.
The good thing about China's market reforms is that by withdrawing from more and more sectors, the party has freed people to achieve real harvests and enjoy the benefits of real economic achievements.
The party now needs to withdraw from more public sectors, especially health and the environment, where it has patently failed. The half-baked reform of China's health system is nothing short of scandalous and the country is now paying for it.
Peasants who can least afford it must shoulder their entire medical burden, while the wealthy party elite and state employees who can afford it enjoy a lavishly subsidised health system which consumes most of the state health budget.
As state enterprises lay off workers or hire new workers, they are supposed to pay their bills but more often won't or can't. Consequently, only those who can afford to pay can expect treatment for SARS, AIDS or other modern plagues.
The Communist Party should be taxing the rich to subsidise the poor, not the other way around. The state no longer micromanages the steel or textile industries and it should now withdraw from controlling the medical profession.
Doctors should be free to make their own professional judgments on scientific issues, regulate professional conduct and decide on the best allocation of scarce resources. Instead we are seeing a mass mobilisation campaign on the lines of traditional party public health campaigns from the 1950s, in which the media will doubtless soon be glorifying the all-powerful party.
This may bring temporary successes but it is no answer. After all, news about SARS was buried in March during the National People's Congress simply to protect the reputation of the party, and that lost the world a precious opportunity to contain it.
The party must also lift its direct controls over the media and allow journalists to report freely on matters of public concern instead of acting at the behest of local party bigwigs only anxious to see their initiatives hailed as successes.
This climate of dishonesty has repeatedly seen top officials announce victory in mass campaigns to clean up the Yellow and Huai rivers or the Kunming or Taihu lakes, which have all proved to be false usually only after those responsible have been promoted elsewhere.
It may just be bad luck that SARS started in China but common sense suggests it is connected to the reckless dash for growth which has left the majority of Chinese drinking the dirtiest water and breathing some of the most dangerously polluted air in the world. It is no surprise that China has exceptionally high stomach and liver cancer rates and the cost of treating its victims bankrupts so many families.
That story, like the damage to health and so much else, has been buried under with false statistics, stifled research or data twisted to meet deliberately lowered "Chinese standards".
Even here in Beijing, where I live in a wealthy enclave in perhaps the richest city in China, the stink of the adjacent Wenyu river reaches for miles around and every ditch and canal is choked with the same festering mix of rubbish and industrial discharges.
Whatever the scientific connection between the pollution and SARS turns out to be, there is certain a poetic justice that SARS originated in Guangdong and is now punishing Hong Kong's economy so severely. Most of the factories in Guangdong are run by Hong Kong and for years have ignored the warnings of their own blighted air and water in a short-term pursuit of profits.
China most now take the chance to confront its lopsided reforms and Hu Jintao could take some bold moves instead of the small incremental changes he seems to have in mind. If he does, he could even count on generating some genuine popularity.