Distinguished Members of the Commission:

Before I begin discussing China’s handling of information relating to SARS, the three of us seated before you thought it would be helpful if I took a second to explain how we work with each other.

First, we are all employees of the Broadcasting Board of Governors, a bipartisan panel of eight presidential appointees and the Secretary of State who oversee all U.S. international broadcasting.

I work for the Voice of America, Mr. Southerland for RFA and Mr. Berman for the International Broadcasting Bureau. Other broadcasters under the BBG include Radio Marti for Cuba, Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, and WorldNet television with which VOA is about to merge.

Each broadcasting entity has a different mission. VOA’s is to be an accurate and comprehensive source of news and information on the United States, the world and the target country. RFA’s is to sound like a local station would sound if the media were free in that country; they attempt to set a high standard for the country to htmire to by being authoritative and credible in reporting what is happening inside the country. Both RFA and VOA adhere to the highest standards of journalism. Together we broadcast 24 hours a day, seven days a week in Mandarin; VOA airs an additional six hours a day in Cantonese and Tibetan. We have four or five million regular listeners to our shortwave broadcasts in China, according to professional audits. The IBB’s mission is to provide support services, such as engineering, for all the broadcasting entities including RFA and VOA.

Even though we have separate missions, all of us who work for the BBG consider our callings to be complimentary and we often work together on common problems — such as trying to find solutions to the way the Chinese jam our broadcasts and block access to our web pages.

Now let me turn to the questions we are here to discuss.

Let me start with my conclusions, then give my reasons for making them:

1. From the very start of the SARS crisis, China’s control of information was absolute.
2. China continues to suppress SARS information.
3. If something similar happened again tomorrow, China would again do its utmost to keep the truth from being known. In this regard, SARS has not made a dent in China’s commitment to total control of information.
4. It is not too late for China to handle this responsibly.
5. The process of political reform, however slight, must begin.
6. Let it start with loosening controls on foreign media.

China did not start reporting news of SARS, then referred to as "atypical pneumonia", until early April, two full months after VOA aired its first report on SARS in Mandarin on February 11th. We had been working on this story for two weeks before then, but had great difficulty confirming that hospitals were being quarantined in Guangdong. Our practice in such cases is to wait for confirmation before reporting the news. One cannot help but wonder if the scale of the SARS crisis might have been held down if the Chinese had not been jamming our broadcasts and blocking our web page. But at the same time that China called for a blackout on all "bad" news during the meetings of the National People’s Congress. We have covered the story every day since then. In more than 400 reports we’ve traced the slow but steady spread of SARS across China, into Hong Kong and around the world.

Just this week (June 2, 2003) the guest on our daily-televised call-in show to China was a representative of the World Health Organization. This man, David Brandling-Bennett, told us he is convinced the Chinese are still holding back and not sharing the full picture with either the WHO — or themselves.

Some of our sources have been silenced. In mid-April, People’s Liberation Army Dr. Jiang Yanyong in Beijing bravely told us that China’s government was understating the number of SARS cases and deaths. A week later, he told us he was being pressured to stop talking with foreign media. Finally, Jiang "had nothing more to say." If China were a more open country, a hero like this would receive a medal for speaking the truth.

Unfortunately, Chinese jamming of VOA broadcasts sharply reduced the reach of these reports. Our regular audience is about 3 or 4 million listeners, a fraction of the potential audience if Beijing stopped its jamming.

Many Chinese would support a loosening of controls on information. VOA regularly interviews prominent Chinese citizens who are not afraid to speak out.

• Chinese author Dai Qing recently told VOA’s listeners, "the central government decides what to do, and does not at all respect the rights of the individual to know the facts, or report the real situation to the people."
• Bao Tong, secretary to former Premier Zhao Ziyang, complained on VOA’s airwaves that "all important information belongs first to the leadership, not to society."
• This week political commentator Liu Sanchan told our audiences "so far, we haven’t seen and in the foreseeable future we cannot expect to see political reform in China. Even if SARS killed 10 million people, instead of just 300, the country’s closed political system would remain the same." He was not being hyperbolic.

China wants to project an international image as an open country with progressive ideas. But, as the SARS disaster reveals, Beijing believes total control of ideas is still vital to national security. China’s government and particularly the Communist Party fear an informed population. In their minds, they see themselves as the sole defenders against chaos. To the extent that this is correct, China has not done enough to build a civil society based on politically neutral institutions and laws. Mao brought an end to 100 years of civil war. Deng changed the economy from a socialist collective to a capitalist semi-free market. Jiang Zemin gave us the "three represents". He talked about political reform, but he never delivered.

China now has a new team in Hu Jintao and Wen Jiabao. SARS is their first challenge. They can choose between taking the same road as all their predecessors or they can use this crisis to start down the road to incremental political reform.

Unfortunately, the way the new leadership is handling the SARS crisis does not bode well. As the epidemic continues to spread, a number of health experts at the WHO and elsewhere continue to express dissatisfaction with China’s secretive handling of SARS statistics. WHO Spokesperson Peter Cordingley told us on May 22 that "when we look at the daily numbers reported by Chinese health authorities on the number of new infections, we wonder why they come down so quickly," said. "And we are working on the theory that possibly not all SARS cases are being correctly identified." To this day, China’s statistics remain dubious and uncreditable. There is a charitable interpretation of this situation — that China’s size makes collection of statistics difficult; there is always a huge difference between urban statistics and rural ones; this problem, combined with an unwillingness on the part of local officials to report bad news to the central government, makes them nearly impossible to assess accurately.

But there is no charitable way of interpreting the manner in which China has denied Taiwan access to SARS information. Responsibility for this must be laid directly at the door of the top leadership. Not only did President Hu and Premier Wen’s representatives at the World Health Organization succeed in denying Taiwan observer status at last month’s meeting, their ambassador to the United Nations this week blocked the New York-based director of Taipei’s Economic and Cultural Office from addressing the United Nations Journalists’ Association after the Association invited him to talk to them about SARS. It will be a long time before I am persuaded that President Hu Jintao and Premier Wen Jiabao were not responsible for this. Trying to force their brothers and sisters on Taiwan to face the SARS epidemic alone is an act as callous as anything Mao or Deng ever did.

Even so, the situation may not be hopeless. Conservatives remain strong but reformers, millions of what I call "underground dissidents" working within the system, want to reform politically and are determined to do so without causing the instability that the conservatives fear.

Yes, Hu and Wen face daunting problems, not the least of which is the dismantling of State owned enterprises and the impact that would have on the livelihood of 150 million urban workers. The list is long indeed. But they cannot really want to see the 2008 Olympic games be shrouded in a cloud of fear that athletes might compete in an event where mistakes affecting public health are secret? How much longer does China have to allow Party censors to stand between the people of China and the information they need to take control of their own lives?

We must not underestimate our ability to influence the pace of political reform in China. This Commission is positioned to recommend to the Congress and indeed to the Chinese a few painless steps that would begin the process of opening up politically.

The first step would be to invoke reciprocity between the number of Chinese government-sponsored journalists in the U.S. and the number of U.S. government-sponsored journalists in China. China has more than 40 government-sponsored journalists on our soil. VOA has been operating with only two in Beijing; RFA has none. The obvious remedy is reciprocity, which would mean either more visas for us or fewer for the Chinese.

And what about the ability of our journalists to travel around China with the ease of, say, a foreign tourist? We can accept that there are certain off-limits areas where problems exist or where China has military installations. But must we continue to accept that we cannot travel outside the Beijing metropolitan area without permission and an escort, whose expense we must pay? China’s U.S.-based reporters can go wherever they want; why can’t we do the same? Let the Chinese choose which field to play on; all we care is that it be level, reciprocal.

Given the SARS disaster, is it not time to ask the Chinese to end blocking our web pages? These pages are full of helpful information on SARS and have been since the crisis began.

Finally, let us ask the Chinese every day between now and the opening of the Olympics in Beijing in 2008 how they can expect the world to send its best athletes into their care if their government thinks the proper response to a health crisis is to cover it up?

China loves to see its flag flying alongside that of other nations. For this reason their leaders invest heavily in acquiring memberships symbolizing China’s status in the international community. They believe their size and history automatically merit international respect and they should be granted privileges such as hosting the Olympics without having to prove anything.

China will someday realize that the free flow of information is a far truer mark of a civil society than joining the World Health Organization or hosting the Olympics. It is my hope that these hearings and the report of this Commission will serve to communicate this message to the Chinese leadership and that the next time a SARS-like crisis hits China, the first response will be to get the word out.

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