Five years since a deadly virus hit, our five-part series looks back and asks what lessons have been learned; Part 4 - The mainland crisis
China's leaders have long boasted of having a knack for turning crisis into opportunity and this was the line Beijing maintained after the battle against Sars, the toughest public health challenge of recent times.
Central government advisers say the fight to eradicate the disease in 2003 gave the mainland the impetus to introduce reforms on several levels, improving transparency, crisis management and public health system by boosting investment.
But those gains came at the cost of more than 340 lives on the mainland, 5,300 people infected and months of anxiety across the country. The crisis undermined the government's credibility and China's image abroad. Five years after the outbreak, there are lingering doubts about the impact and some analysts are concerned that Beijing has not fully learned its lesson.
World Health Organisation chief Margaret Chan Fung Fu-chun probably knows better than most how hard it is to extract information from the central government. As Hong Kong's health director at the time, it was her role to confirm media reports of an outbreak in Guangdong when the virus first appeared in February 2003.
In remarks to a Legislative Council select committee in January 2004, Dr Chan said she had been told a year earlier by a provincial health official that communicable diseases were classified as state secrets. Beijing, with its long history of secrecy, initially spent weeks denying there was any problem, losing a prime opportunity to try to stop the virus from spreading around the globe.