Rhetoric of a Global Epidemic: Transcultural Communication about SARS

4. Constructing SARS: The United States, China, and WHO

134 4 Constructing SARS: The United States, China, and WHO How did different key cultural players construct the global epidemic of SARS and the SARS-China relationship? What forces motivated and shaped such rhetorical constructions, and what impacts did they have on the global anti-SARS campaign? In his famous treatise titled On Guerrilla Warfare, Chairman Zedong Mao provides detailed definitions for his notion of people’s war: The revisionary war is a war of the masses; it can be waged only by mobilizing the masses and relying on them. [. . .] The masses, the millions upon millions of people who genuinely and sincerely support the revolution‍[,] is the real iron bastion which it is impossible, and absolutely impossible, for any force on earth to smash. (88) Mao clearly lays out the approach to launch a people’s war. In addition to having a strong army, “we must also organize contingents of the people’s militia on a big scale. This will make it difficult for the imperialists to move a single inch in our country in the event of invasion” (89–90). Among his list of ten principles of operation for a people’s war, two of them are particularly pertinent to the people’s war against SARS that the Chinese top leaders launched in late April 2003: “Fight no battle unprepared. [. . .] Give full play to our style of fight—courage in battle, no fear of sacrifice, no fear of fatigue, and continuous fight” (90). Several factors contributed to China’s belated response to SARS: the country ’s lack of knowledge about the emerging mysterious pneumonia from November 2002 to February 2003, its backward public health facilities, and its institutional disarray and official inaction. As a result, WHO employed biopolitical measures, such as travel advisories, onsite inspections, and technical support, to intervene in March. Closely collaborating with WHO, China managed to launch an aggressive people’s war against SARS through mass mobilization. China eventually managed to eradicate SARS with the operation principles that Mao articulates above, namely, full preparation, courage, 135 Constructing SARS sacrifice, and tireless and continuous fight. In contrast with China’s long and challenging battle with SARS, the United States took a proactive approach to contain the import of the SARS virus in March 2003 and successfully prevented the spread of SARS within its borders. Priscilla Wald defines what she calls “the outbreak narrative” as “a formulaic plot that begins with the identification of an emerging infection, includes discussion of the global networks throughout which it travels, and chronicles the epidemiological work that ends with its containment” (2). Outbreak narratives have explicit politics that “consistently register anxieties about the global village that reflexively imagined the containment of disease in national terms against its actual and threatened border crossings” (Wald 63). Circulating across media and genres, outbreak narratives “make the act of imagining the community a central feature of its preservation” (Wald 52). Wald’s cases examine the outbreak narratives about AIDS and Typhoid Mary within individual countries and the rich scientific, journalistic, and fictional discourses surrounding such outbreaks. When applied to a transnational context, the study of cross-cultural epidemic rhetoric and outbreak narratives would necessarily investigate epidemic narratives told both by epicenters and by little-affected regions. The analysis of outbreak narratives told by countries and regions both inside and outside the epicenters would yield new understanding about the differences between the ways individual countries construct emerging epidemics originating elsewhere and the ways epicenters tell their own stories about local outbreaks. For instance, the analysis in this chapter reveals that despite China’s final success in eradicating SARS, SARS coverage in American media did not achieve full closure. Both WHO publications and Chinese media employed full-fledged outbreak narratives, with different focuses on technological inadequacy and infrastructural backwardness. The media coverage in the United States, however, paid close attention to China’s underreporting and utter confusion about SARS throughout the outbreak but discussed very little the final containment and eradication of SARS in China. Thus, the US outbreak narrative about SARS seems to tell a story about a country failing to cope with an emerging epidemic because of ideological and political reasons. Then, mysteriously and luckily, that failing country somehow managed to get the job done. As a comparative rhetorical study about transcultural narratives of SARS, this chapter examines the transcultural rhetorical construction of SARS in 136 Constructing SARS American mass media, in Chinese mainstream...