China Syndrome

Karl Taro Greenfeld

• Publisher: HarperCollins e-books
• Year: 2009
• ISBN:
  9780061851520
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: International Relations
• Index: Politics & International Relations

" China Syndrome is a fast-moving, truth-is-stranger-than-fiction thriller that doubles as an excellent primer of emerging infections for scientists and laypeople alike. But that's not all. For readers more captivated by world politics than by microbiology, its chief strength, beyond the superb writing, is a detailed look at China's culture of secrecy in the throes of a global public health crisis." — Los Angeles Times

When the SARS virus broke out in China in January 2003, Karl Taro Greenfeld was the editor of Time Asia in Hong Kong, just a few miles from the epicenter of the outbreak. After vague, initial reports of terrified Chinese boiling vinegar to "purify" the air, Greenfeld and his staff soon found themselves immersed in the story of a lifetime.

Deftly tracking a mysterious viral killer from the bedside of one of the first victims to China's overwhelmed hospital wards—from cutting-edge labs where researchers struggle to identify the virus to the war rooms at the World Health Organization headquarters in Geneva— C hina Syndrome takes readers on a gripping ride that blows through the Chinese government's effort to cover up the disease... and sounds a clarion call warning of a catastrophe to come: a great viral storm potentially more deadly than any respiratory disease since the influenza of 1918.

BOOK 1

What Is It?

CHAPTER 1

November 1, 2002

Shenzhen, Guangdong province, China

7 Infected, 0 Dead

FANG LIN, TWENTY-FOUR, TOLD ME HE HAD AWAKENED TO THE USUAL cacophony: the bleat of a truck reversing; the steady, metallic thump of a jackhammer; the whining buzz of a steel saw; the driving in of nails; the slapping down of bricks; the irregular thumping—like sneakers in a dryer—of a cement mixer.

They were building—a skyscraper, a shopping mall, a factory, a new highway, an overpass, a subway, a train station—here, there, everywhere. Up and down the coast, from Shenzhen to Fujian to Shanghai to Tianjin, this was what you heard. Fang Lin had already become used to it. He had no choice, because the sound had become ubiquitous, as regular and familiar as the breath coming through his nostrils.

He had just arrived in Shenzhen, from Nanpo in Jiangxi province. The second son of a rice-farming family, he came of age during the era of reforms. The Cultural Revolution and the Great Helmsman were for him curious historical relics—Mao was the guy on the money—as relevant to Fang’s life as Genghis Khan or Terra-cotta Warriors. Even the great events of his childhood were shrouded in the same obfuscating gauze of prehistory: Tiananmen represented in his mind nothing more than a square in Beijing. His parents, recalling the hardship of China’s great upheavals of the fifties and sixties, were grateful to be allowed to farm their plot, raise their children, and pay their local officials for the right to slaughter their own chickens, ducks, and pigs. They even owned their ancestral plot now and could sell their harvest for cash. They’d bought a color television and were saving for a mobile phone. Having lived through decades of sacrifice and poverty, they were thrilled to be able to eat as much pork as they wanted and to watch pirated Hong Kong action pictures on their VCD players.

But if this first post-reform generation was happy to gaze at other people’s better lives on their TV sets, then the second generation, Fang Lin’s cohorts, were eager to inhabit those fancier images. As the second son, Fang didn’t stand to inherit any of the family land. That would all go to his older brother, who was already married to a girl from the village with bad skin who seemed to go through a box of Choco Pies every day. She would become fat, Fang Lin warned his brother. But for their parents, even obesity remained a virtue. There had been no fat people before the reforms—the whole country then had subsisted on a starvation diet.

Li tu means, literally, to leave the land, to give up life as a cultivator for a nonfarming job. For Fang Lin, the decision to leave the land had been an easy one. He knew other second sons and first daughters who had gone south to make money. And it was money that mattered now, Fang Lin knew. Even Mao—or was it Deng?—had said, “To get rich is glorious.” There was food in the village, but there was no money. Money was in the south, along the coasts, in the boomtowns he saw on television. China was becoming rich, but it was becoming rich around the edges while it stayed poor in the middle. For millions of Chinese trapped in the hinterlands, that meant hitting the road, hopping a bus, truck, or train to the coast and seeking employment in a factory or construction crew, restaurant or brothel. The newspapers dubbed it the Hundred Million Man March, and one boy or girl seemed to set out from the village every day to join it, especially in the early winter, after the harvest. Fang Lin borrowed five hundred kwai (RMB) from his brother, packed his extra shirt in a vinyl duffel bag that his sister-in-law’s parents had received when they visited Nanchang with their work group five years earlier, and walked out of town to the road that ran along the river. He thumbed a ride with a truck, buying the driver a bowl of noodles at a gas station, and then caught a local bus south to Nanchang. He then paid a hundred kwai for an upper berth on a sleeper bus to Shenzhen. As soon as he was on board, he reclined and watched the TV embedded in the roof above the driver. But soon the bus was so thick with smoke that Fang Lin could barely make out the CCTV newscaster.

They rode for thirty-six hours, the villages gradually giving way to county seats and the rough farmland replaced by workshops and factories. By morning they were already in Guangzhou, rolling south along the Guan-Shen Highway, past multi-acre factory compounds with corrugated-roofed workshops that were bigger than Fang Lin’s whole village, rice paddies and all. Entire mountains seemed to have been hollowed out for gravel and cement. There were stretches where the landscape was practically lunar, just a few stones, and hunched amid the swirling dust were a handful of shacks made of scavenged wood and cloth. Occasionally, a family farm would appear to be holding out between the encroaching factories and construction sites. Its crop—usually tropical fruit—was coated by a film of dust.

When Fang Lin looked at this, he says, he thought it was beautiful. Amazing. Progress. Soon, there would be no more farms at all. Just factories as far as the eye could see. How many people worked on a farm—one, maybe two? But in a factory, he could not begin to count.

At the central bus station in Shenzhen, Fang Lin found a red pay phone beside a cigarette stand and called the number he had for two other boys from his village, Du Chan and Huang Po, who had come south. In his thick Jiangxi accent, he asked the woman who answered if he could leave word for his friends. She told him he could leave a message, but it would be delivered only if the receiving party were willing to pay a kwai for the privilege.

“Why would anyone pay if they don’t know who it’s from?” Fang Lin recalled asking.

“Otherwise, how do we make any money from this?” she had countered. “If it’s important, he’ll pay for the message.”

Fang Lin told her who he was and that he would be arriving shortly. He doubted anyone would ever pick up that message. After hanging up, he bought a fresh package of cigarettes and bottle of sweet lemon tea and showed an address to the cigarette seller, who studied it for a moment and then told him to follow the signs for the southern border.

Fang Lin set off on foot. He stopped every hundred meters or so and showed his address to another pedestrian. Usually, they didn’t understand his accent. But they could read the paper and point him in the right direction.

He was disappointed by the buildings. He had assumed they would be taller, grander. But these were no higher than those in Nanchang, Jiangxi’s provincial capital. And these roads were no wider. And the people here seemed no better dressed. The difference, he noticed, was a matter of volume. There were more tall buildings, more wide streets, and more pedestrians. There were more shops, he discovered, selling more clothes, more televisions, more VCDs, and more fake fur coats. There were more rich people. More bums. More cripples and more whores. And there were more migrants. The reason half the people he stopped to ask for directions could not help him was that many of them had just arrived themselves.

By the time Fang Lin found his way to the district of Shenzhen where his fellow villagers had supposedly bivouacked, it had already become dark and he was thirsty and hungry, having had nothing to drink since buying the bottle of tea at the station. The neighborhood was already swathed in shadow, the narrow alleys and dirt lanes obscured by smoke and steam. At one corner, he found a storefront where a woman sat behind a counter. Beside her were five booths in which five different men were shouting into red phones. He showed her the slip of paper with his contacts’ names and addresses. She nodded and told him the charge would be one kwai. After he paid, she handed him a slip of onionskin paper on which he found the message he had left for his friends earlier that day. At least that meant he was in the right place.

After asking around, he was told by another migrant from Jiangxi that Du Chan and Huang Po had gone north, to find work in a factory that made the machines that make sewing machines.

Though he didn’t know anyone in Shenzhen, Fang Lin found that numerous other men from western Jiangxi had preceded him there, and the familiar accents seemed comforting after his two-day journey. From a stall set up in a narrow alley, he ordered a plate of chicken intestines, scallions, and red peppers—a Jiangxi dish—and a bottle of beer, which he shared with two other fellows he had just met. In turn, they offered him lodging for the night—he would just have to pitch in ten kwai for his third of the room. And if he wanted lighting or heat, he would have to make sure to get the change from his dinner in one-kwai coins, for the box in the room that provided electricity by the hour.

He slipped into his sleeping pallet on the floor and turned away from his roommates in their bunks so that he could slide his red plastic wallet into his pants. When he woke up, his roommates were already gone. He noticed they had rummaged through his duffel bag and taken his cigarettes. His wallet was safe between his legs.

FANG LIN HAD ARRIVED IN SHENZHEN DURING WHAT WOULD COME TO be known as the Era of Wild Flavor. China’s economic boom had been going strong for more than a decade, especially in the south, and Shenzhen, as the first of China’s Special Economic Zones, or SEZs, had become the urban embodiment of that boom as well as a cautionary tale of the social costs of turbocharged economic development. The city had grown from a rice-farming village of a few thousand to a sprawling metropolis of seven million within twenty years. Each of the central government’s grand plans for Shenzhen, in 1980, 1982, and 1986, had been superseded before implementation as migrants and resettlers swamped developers’ ambitions. The area of Shenzhen was eventually expanded to 150 square kilometers divided into six districts straddling the border with Hong Kong. Most of Shenzhen’s residents, as many as four million, had come to town illegally, not possessing the proper permits to live in the Special Economic Zone. They survived in a legal nether zone, tolerated by officials, employed by local manufacturers, and exploited by landlords, bureaucrats, and cops. The city had been designed with three million in mind, and the infrastructure was drowning in the waves of migrants who washed in every day. “The planners of the Special Economic Zone,” wrote Mihai Craciun in Great Leap Forward, “are now devoted to improvisation and disorder.” The city had no choice but to embrace chaos as a paradigm. Thousands of new buildings went up every year, 2,063 new miles of road were laid down, and 140,000 new homes were built. Adding to Shenzhen’s status as a city of transients was its location as the primary entrepôt between the mainland and Hong Kong—250,000 people a day crossed this most secure internal border in the world.

Hong Kong, of course, is now a part of China, with its own mini-constitution, the arrangement known as “one country, two systems.” In many ways, this has resulted in Shenzhen’s becoming Hong Kong’s parallel universe. It has the same Cantonese energy, the “get ahead” ethos and respect for a buck—or kwai. But thanks to loose laws, widespread prostitution, and dirty officials, you can get anything you want there: knockoff Chanel bags, pirated DVDs, ecstasy pills, one-night stands. Even the money, the objective of so much of this underground commerce, is suspect: local taxi drivers say that one in every twenty bills they collect is counterfeit. The city is the richest in China and also the youngest in the world, with an average age of twenty-four.

At ground level, in the shopping malls and restaurants of Shenzhen, the first impression of the boom is the sheer volume of goods and services on sale. Chinese advertising still hawks primarily based on price; there is very little aspirational marketing. Throughout Shenzhen, the plastic surgeons promise cheaper eyes, lips, and breasts, rather than better ones. And for every Dunhill or Louis Vuitton boutique, there are a thousand no-name shops operating out of retail space let by the day or week. Vast emporia the size of football fields, given over to every conceivable sort of cheap plastic toy and cut-rate cookware—plush animal zoos, narrow aluminum pan alleys—make Shenzhen sometimes seem like a ninety-nine-cent store somehow grown up into a whole city. There are enough crappy vinyl purses to outfit an entire Brezhnev-era Soviet megalopolis, nail clippers for every toe in China. A hairbrush for every strand. Everything is on sale, all the time. Suggest a price, any price, and the vendor will meet it, beat it. Money is made on volume, and they have to sell as much as they can today because more of everything is arriving tomorrow, from factories up and down the Pearl River Delta. You see Hong Kong families returning from the Delta with all manner of household goods loaded onto wagons—new storm windows, heaters, blenders, car radios, tires. There is nothing that can’t be had in the Delta for cheaper than it can be had anywhere else.

The nickname Era of Wild Flavor perfectly evoked the social, economic, and psychic dislocations brought on by this greatest mass urbanization in the history of the world, which coincided with, or perhaps catalyzed, one of the most vertiginous economic booms the planet had ever seen. A businessman friend of mine who runs factories based on the mainland recently described the Delta as a place “where more of everything is being made than has ever been made anywhere at any time.” That may be hyperbole, but certainly China in general, and the Pearl River Delta in particular, has become the low-cost, cut-rate shop floor of the world. China’s economy had grown through the late nineties at an average annual rate of nearly 10 percent. Entire swaths of Pearl River Delta marsh and paddy were drained to make room for factories and container ports. The country boasts 140 car companies, 90 truck companies, two dozen television firms, and 30 that make vacuum cleaners. China manufactures enough televisions to replace the entire global supply every two years. Fifty percent of the world’s phones are made in China, 30 percent of the world’s microwave ovens (and one would guess about 100 percent of the world’s pirated CDs and knockoff Prada bags). Twenty percent of everything Wal-Mart sells is made in China, and 25 percent of Best Buy’s merchandise comes from the Middle Kingdom. Look around your own home: that frying pan, blender, coffeemaker, hair dryer, sewing machine, shower curtain, doormat, flowerpot, pencil sharpener, ballpoint pen, broom, mop, and bucket. All of them made in China, and probably in the Pearl River Delta. China’s demand for raw materials has driven up oil and gas prices around the world, as tankers anchored off Guangzhou, Shenzhen, and Hong Kong have to wait weeks to offload. Steel, aluminum, ore, oil—you name the raw material, and China has bid up the global price for it over the last two years.

The prevailing philosophy—that business model of “more is good and cheaper is best”—became a mantra of the Era of Wild Flavor. If you were living in the Delta, you saw that more of everything was being sold, more money was being made, more buildings were being erected. The tycoons of more—the factory owners, the landlords, the scalpel cowboys doing four dozen eye jobs a day, the real estate brokers, the pimps, the party officials—they, too, had more money than ever before. They spent it on mah-jongg and Audi automobiles and karaoke girls and bottles of Hennessy in ceramic Napoleon-on-his-rearing-steed bottles.

And they spent it on Wild Flavor, yewei, a key element of new China’s conspicuous consumption. Southern Chinese have always noshed more widely through the animal kingdom than virtually any other peoples on earth. During the Era of Wild Flavor, the range, scope, and amount of wild animal cuisine consumed would increase to include virtually every species on land, sea, or air. Wild Flavor was supposed to give you face, to bring you luck, to make you fan rong,...