Date: 18 June 2300
From: ProMED-mail<promed@promedmail.org>
Source: New Zealand Herald 16 June 2003 [edited]
<http://www.nzherald.co.nz/storydisplay.cfm?storyID=3507534&msg=emaillink>

By early February 2003, the people of Guangdong province had begun to panic [over a] mysterious virus the world would come to know as SARS, but [whose] existence had not even been acknowledged by the Chinese government or by the media. Yet by 10 Feb 2003 news of a "fatal flu in Guangdong" had reached 120 million people through text messaging, say some reports, and an untold extra number through email and internet chatrooms. Chinese authorities had little choice but to acknowledge the outbreak and try to restore calm. The government had been taught a painful lesson about controlling the news in a burgeoning high-tech society.

By mid-February 2003, officials began complaining about the use of text messaging to spread "rumours", deeming them subversive activity and a threat to stability. Then they began arresting people. By the end of May 2003, 117 people in 17 provinces had been arrested and charged with disturbing social order by spreading SARS-related rumours, the Xinhua news 
agency reported. But [it was not stated] how those rumours were spread.

With its control slipping, the government's response [to the situation] has been to combine cutting-edge technology with repression. Its technology allows it, for example, to search the country's entire volume of email traffic for words such as "Falungong", or to monitor any individual's text messages. Anyone snared in its high-tech web can expect surveillance, 
intimidation, arrest, and prison. The publicity surrounding the arrests and prison sentences helps the government achieve what experts say is its strategy of creating a climate of fear in which the people begin censoring themselves.

"The cyberpolice, which have tens of thousands of members, are capable of arresting internet users anywhere in the country if they send a few messages considered 'subversive' or likely to 'jeopardise the state's security'," wrote the watchdog group Reporters Without Borders in a report released last month. One topic subject to nearly blanket censorship in early April 2003 was SARS. On 10 Apr 2003, a researcher posted a message on a sina.com.cn forum containing the word SARS and just calling on the Chinese government to work closely with Hong Kong to arrest the epidemic. The message did not appear. A second message about SARS was submitted to the site 5 days later. It met the same fate.

"The authorities seem to have asked the websites to add the term SARS to the long list of banned words. So no criticism of the government's handling of the SARS crisis can be seen on the most popular sites."

[byline: Henry Hoenig, in Beijing]

-- 
ProMED-mail
<promed@promedmail.org>

[ProMED-mail supports the free exchange of information relating to outbreaks of infectious diseases and protests in the strongest possible terms the imprisonment of citizens of any country for reporting such information to the world. ProMED-mail policy is NOT to criticize any government UNLESS it arrests and imprisons people for the above reason. Dr Dessy Mendoza of Cuba was imprisoned in 1997 for talking to foreign news media about the epidemic of dengue in Santiago de Cuba. ProMED-mail protested publicly (see references below), and our posts were picked up by Amnesty International and Physicians for Human Rights, who intervened on his behalf. The Pope's visit to Cuba eventually got him out after 2 years, 
with his health broken.

It is now evident that China's suppression of news about SARS in south China helped fuel a global epidemic that could have been controlled more quickly, with fewer fatalities and much less economic damage, if news of that outbreak had been reported rapidly and fully to the world. This principle, that rapid dissemination of accurate information on emerging diseases and outbreaks will lead to better public health, is the basis of ProMED-mail's existence.

ProMED calls on the Chinese government to immediately and unconditionally release any people imprisoned for trying to get the news on SARS out. - Mod.LM]