HONG KONG -- When China sacked its health minister and the mayor of Beijing on Easter Sunday for their mishandling of the SARS crisis, many political analysts predicted that severe acute respiratory syndrome would have the same effect on China that the Chernobyl nuclear disaster of 1986 had on the Soviet Union, accelerating political reform.
Commentators wrote knowledgeably about how the government was going to be open and accountable and how the media would be given unprecedented freedoms to report and criticize.
However, hopes for a relaxation of the Communist Party's control over the media were soon dashed. China blacked out a CNN interview that was critical of the government's handling of SARS. A former propaganda department official was installed as editor of Southern Weekend, one of the country's most daring newspapers, to rein it in.