The casualties of Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome have now spread to the upper ranks of China's Communist Party. What the world is suddenly witnessing is a lesson in the limits of authoritarianism in the information age.

After months of covering up the extent and the dangers from SARS, Beijing decided on Sunday to admit what the rest of the world already knew. Health Minister Zhang Wenkang and Beijing Mayor Meng Xuenong were stripped of their Party posts and yesterday of their government titles as well. The weeklong May Day holiday was canceled to prevent travelers spreading the disease. And the official number of cases in Beijing jumped nearly 10-fold.

The cashiering of Minister Zhang and Mayor Meng confirms that a major debate has been taking place behind the Communist Party scenes over the handling of SARS. The two fall guys represented different factions in the opaque leadership, so it's hard to sort out whether their sacking is a victory for reformers or the old guard. But it's certainly an object lesson in the limits of paranoid communist secrecy.

The world's politicians and scientists have been yelling at Beijing to wake up to the severity of SARS and work with them to solve the problem. U.S. Secretary of Health and Human Services Tommy Thompson said last week, "We've been very upset with the transparency of the Chinese government -- we think lives could have been saved, we could have controlled it." The EU's External Relations Commissioner Christopher Patten (who, as the last governor of British Hong Kong, knows whereof he speaks) said that China had been "less than truthful" -- diplomat-speak for lying.

Even the World Health Organization became more outspoken about its frustrated efforts to find the truth, telling Beijing "the international community doesn't trust your figures." Perhaps this is because only last week Beijing doctors were forced to put SARS patients into ambulances and drive them around the city to fool WHO investigators.

The hard truth is that joining the modern world of free-flowing goods, capital and people brings responsibilities along with benefits. While foreign investment and trade have transformed China economically, its one-party dictatorship has remained largely unchanged. So when SARS hit, both local and national-level officials tried to cover their own behinds at the expense of the people they governed -- and the rest of us.

As a result, China is now losing tourism revenue, its people are getting restless because they don't trust their leaders and investors are re-evaluating the risks of putting so many of their manufacturing eggs in Beijing's basket. China's belated candor has only increased anxiety, and even some panic, as the public wondered yesterday what else the mandarins may be hiding.

An increasingly affluent and well-informed population in China knows that Hong Kong's government has been transparent about the number of SARS cases there and has worked with the public to control its spread. Beijing authorities no doubt concluded that if they didn't admit the obvious, public anger and frustration would grow. A new generation of leaders is discovering, much as Mikhail Gorbachev did during the Chernobyl disaster, that in the modern world transparency is more conducive to social stability than lying.

In a March 31 editorial, "Quarantine China," we called for a temporary halt to travel to and from China until its government began cooperating with the world to control SARS. Alas, our fears have been borne out, with the WHO now saying SARS "could become the first severe new disease of the 21st century with global epidemic potential." The cost of such a travel ban would have been high, but by now the estimated cost of SARS has soared into the billions of dollars and travel has fallen off anyway because of fear of the disease.

Communist functionaries weren't very happy with our criticism. A typically subtle commentary, "Malicious Stirring to No Avail," in last Thursday's edition of People's Daily, the most important mouthpiece of the Chinese Communist Party, slammed us for politicizing the problem and wanting to contain China -- the nationalist lie always favored by communist bureaucrats.

But clearly some Party leaders now wish they had taken our advice. On the same day the People's Daily lashed out, General Secretary Hu Jintao called a meeting of China's Politburo to address SARS. Afterward he issued a call to stop the delay and deceit in reporting cases of the disease, and Sunday's political sacrifices followed.

Authoritarian China's disastrous handling of SARS shows that democratic transparency works far better at handling crises in the modern world of free-flowing information and travel. China's other disease is its secretive dictatorship.

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