Efficiency Experts

The Chinese are taking SARS seriously. And when they decide something is serious, they mean serious! The mayor of Beijing, Meng Xuenong, and Minister of Health Zhang Wenkang are both in the process of being sacked and replaced.

The Chinese Communist Party has mastered dictatorial bureaucracy as no one else ever could. In this situation, they realize their mismanagement has allowed SARS to spread, and they admitted higher death and infection counts (prev: 37; now: 346) than they have been telling the world until now. Of course, we don't know if they new numbers are correct.

Even bigger than the firing of Meng and Zhang is the cancelation of the annual May Day vacation week. In an effort to limit the spread of the virus, especially from urban to rural parts of China, the authoritarian authorities just decided to keep everyone at school for the week.

Some pro-democracy Chinese are touting this as the beginning of democracy. They know much more about the situation than I do, but I have one serious advantage: this is my blog. And Instant Replay doesn't see this as a harbinger of coming democracy. Rather, this shows the resilience and Darwinistic strength of the CCP regime. They will not be made irrelevant or rendered ineffective by events. Crises such as SARS that test governments will allow the CCP to proove itself ever more efficient and flexible. Instead of a hard-line, communist authoritarian regime, we will increasingly see a capitalist autocracy that can consistently outmaneuver democratic governments (because the CCP has no need for the delays of a systems of checks and balances) and challenge us in any arena it wishes.