LONDON -- Governments and political parties habitually find it hard to admit to having made mistakes. Ministers and party officials who resign after getting things wrong cover their tracks with talk of seeking new horizons or spending more time with their families. The more authoritarian a regime, the less likely it is to admit to error -- as if doing so would undermine its claim to rule.

All of which makes China's latest action over SARS, or sudden acute respiratory syndrome, all the more striking, with important implications for how the last major nation still ruled by a communist party operates and interacts with the outside world.

Not only are the health minister and the mayor of Beijing gone for failure to handle the outbreak of the virus in the capital properly, but Liu Qi, the party Politburo official in charge of Beijing, has also admitted "obvious deficiencies in our work" and taken personal responsibility in what he called "sincere self-criticism." In a further step, his "sincere self-criticism" before a party meeting was made public in the official media for all to see.