Cassandra’s Dream

China’s rise as a new world power, as the western whispers have it, is akin to an unwanted monster gate-crashing a banquet hosted by the United States for its Western partners. Reaching onto the head table for a plate of goose liver, the monster belches as he devours the delicacies in front of a dismayed host and his gawking guests. With all table manners brushed aside, the uninvited intruder splutters out a new rule that from now on chopsticks and soy sauce must be placed on the dining table alongside knives and forks as part of a new “Beijing model.”

It has taken some time for the stunned gathering to respond to the strangest episode in the memory of Western civilization since the interruption of the legendary Green Knight into a New Year’s Eve party held by King Arthur of Camelot. Former Time Asia editor Karl Taro Greenfeld’s “China Syndrome”—a whistleblowing-style account of the true, chilling story of SARS, the 21st century’s first epidemic—reads like a nightmarish outcry at this sinister and odd new guest.

Loaded with meticulous detail and guided by a cold journalistic instinct, Greenfeld’s book plots the route of the mysterious virus from its apparent source at a market in Yewei (meaning “Wild Flavor”) in Guangdong in 2002, where he witnessed 52 cats stuffed into one cage so tightly that “their intestines were spilling out from between the wire bars.” Then his camera-lens-like pen zooms out onto a purgatorial panorama reminiscent of the famous cinematic shock of the vast mud of corpses in “The Killing Fields”: “There were 55 such cages in this one stall. There were 52 stalls down this one row of vendors. And there were six rows in this one market. And there were seven markets on this one street.”

The book resonates as a dark documentary with a diabolical Oliver Stone-like narrative pace. The new millennium was ushered in with an Oriental epidemic on a scale unseen since the plague, almost immediately following the 9/11 attacks. It would make Samuel Huntington smile in his grave.

As a Chinese person, my feelings were deeply hurt as I ploughed through the chronology of horror, where the Chinese government is accused of covering up the truth about this biblical-level virus. I could not blame the Opium War as a source of such evil, and there was no evidence that it was produced in some CIA-sponsored clandestine medical lab hidden in a cave somewhere in the Rocky Mountains. To my relief, Greenfeld points out that denial of epidemics is not an exclusively Chinese habit—when smallpox first appeared in the Roman Empire around 180 A.D., the initial impulse of local officials was to “issue edicts attributing the recent mortalities to an unhappy Jupiter or a vengeful Mars.”In this comparison, at least Chairman Mao is like some kind of Julius Caesar figure. This must sound flattering to the many new Maoist zealots mushrooming recently in Chungking. Whether or not it prognosticates another epidemic—of that I am not sure.