BEIJING -- When SARS broke out in Guangdong Province, the government chose to keep quiet about it. It was a mistake that would not only endanger the world's health and economy, but also undermine the credibility of the Chinese government itself.

Even in a country as closely kept under wraps as China, the truth has a way of coming out.

On the evening of April 3, Jiang Yanyong, a 72-year-old semiretired surgeon, was watching TV at his home in Beijing.

That night the news featured a spot in which China's Health Minister, Zhang Wenkang, announced that China's capital had just 12 cases of SARS.

Jiang couldn't believe his ears.

He was a former head of surgery at Beijing's Military Hospital 301, and still did regular work there. How, he wondered, could the minister tell the world Beijing had only 12 cases of SARS when he knew for a fact there were 50 in his hospital alone?

"I simply couldn't believe what I was seeing," he wrote in an e-mail the next day to the state-run television station CCTV-4. "All the doctors and nurses who saw yesterday's news were furious."

The state TV channel's reaction was predictable: silence.

But when the e-mail made it to the hands of the foreign media, the allegations were soon circling the world. The WHO, which had bought the government's line that the epidemic was under control, demanded access to Beijing's military hospitals.

Within a fortnight, the government upped its Beijing SARS statistics tenfold; three days later, the numbers were doubled again.

By then, the virus that hatched somewhere in Guangdong had percolated 2,000 km north to the Chinese capital and infected close to 1,000 people.