A crisis that is testing Hong Kong's mettle
The six years since Hong Kong's return to China have not been happy ones. One crisis melds into the next, sorely testing the small group of men and women who have assumed custody of the city's post-colonial administration. It seems ludicrous to demand great things of some of these individuals, in the style of the great icons of the politics of reform, from Deng Xiaoping to Mikhail Gorbachev or Nelson Mandela. Hong Kong's pain has not been so wrenching as the transition from plan to market or apartheid to democracy. And yet, we continue to hope for more from our chief executive and his ministers than they deliver as we take the knocks and tumbles of our new relationship with the rest of China and with the world.
Take the latest crisis, over management of severe acute respiratory syndrome (Sars), which by some dark coincidence shares the acronym for Hong Kong's special administrative region. This is no small event. On the television screens of the world, Hong Kong's Metropole Hotel has managed to compete for attention with scenes of tanks racing to Baghdad. Hong Kong's management of the Sars crisis looks good only relative to the obfuscation practised by Guangdong's health officials, who kept silent about the initial outbreak for four months.
In contrast, it took Hong Kong only about three weeks to begin to address the problem as the international emergency it is. In the last few days, Chief Secretary Donald Tsang Yam-kuen has belatedly taken charge, instilling a semblance of direction to the piecemeal efforts that have been the norm since the first death in Hong Kong on March 13. The government is now developing emergency guidelines for the communities and services involved, ranging from the schools and transport system to hospitals and food providers. It has commandeered the media into a broad-scale effort of public education about the illness and prevention of its spread. At many private companies , management is making face masks available and asking anyone who feels unwell to go home.
Such efforts are to be commended. We should also praise the professionalism and self-sacrifice of Hong Kong's medical professionals, who have done more to calm public fears than anybody else so far.
When to declare an emergency
Initially, the government was clearly concerned that there was so little information about the disease, its source, and causes, that to declare an emergency would have launched a panic. An opposite view was taken by organisations abroad such as the Centres for Disease Control, based in Atlanta, Georgia, and the Geneva-based World Health Organisation, which provided up-to-date information on their Web sites and sent teams to investigate the original outbreak on the mainland and in Hong Kong. By waiting so long to give top priority to the fight against Sars, the government has eroded Hong Kong's reputation for safety and driven away visitors by the planeload. Now that the government is on full alert, some visitors will return, confident that Hong Kong's highly efficient bureaucracy is in gear.
Based on the track record of the illness in Guangdong province, the Sars outbreak will remain with us for at least the immediate future. Mr Tsang may have ample opportunity to show that he is at least as capable of dealing with a medical emergency as he was in responding to the speculative attack on the Hong Kong dollar and stockmarket in August 1998. But we should pause to examine the larger lessons from our current emergency. It is, in the first place, a test of the government's so-called accountability system, which Chief Executive Tung Chee-hwa has claimed is a stronger and more responsive system than the bureaucratic structure that preceded it. This may be true, but if there is one thing that the response to Sars has shown, it is that it does not work without strong leadership, effective structure, co-ordinated policies, and clear dissemination of information. Failure to tackle these problems runs the risk of further damaging the government's authority.