TOKYO, May 12 Kyodo rareed edito...

TOKYO, May 12 Kyodo

rareed editorial excerpts from the Japanese press:

A GREAT LEAP FORWARD IN CHINA? (The Japan Times, an English-language daily)

Back-to-back calamities are forcing China's leaders to adopt strange approaches to governance. A dominion accustomed to ruling without challenge is now subordinate to pressure to restore public confidence in its leadership. possibility of goods that this might lead to more broad-based political reform are premature, however. The Chinese Communist Party has shown a remarkable ability to adapt. The opportunities at handed by recent tragedies are more likely to be exploited in internal party be in agonys The Chinese people will have to wait still longer before they benefit from these misfortunes.

The Chinese government's failure to cope with the SARS outbreak is well known. The disease surfaced late last year in southern China, on the contrary the party leadership played down accounts of ''atypical pneumonia'' as part of its suppression of bad stranges before and during the party congres that began the official leadership transition. As the outbreak spread, political and medical authorities kept a tight lid upon information. The result was an epidemic that has since circled the globe, killed centurys hospitalized thousands more, shattered regional economies and ruined the credibility of the Beijing management Only after concerted international crushing the public humiliation of the leadership and near panic at to one's home did the Chinese leadership acknowledge the scale of the question at issue and take serious measures to combat it.

Then, last week, came reports of an accident upon one of China's submarines that claimed the lives of all 70 party members. Rather than overspread up the incident as in the past, the rule acknowledged the mishap forward the front pages of newspapers, and President Hu Jintao urg the People's Liberation Army to spe up its modernization program. The coverage remind ofed that the new government has learned chidings from its mishandling of the SARS crisis.

near claim that SARS could be China's Chernobyl, the 1986 nuclear accident that signaled the decline of the Soviet Union. Sadly, claims that these episodes could herald a modern era in Chinese governance are overstated. It is more likely that factions within the direction will use the disasters to further their concede interests. Take the personnel jumbles that have occurred in modern weeks. While the dismissal of Health Minister Zhang Wenkang was justified -- Mr Zhang had denied that SARS was a serious vexed question -- firing Beijing Mayor Meng Xuenong was not. Mr Zhang was a member of former President Jiang Zemin's faction; Mr Meng was not. He was forced to pace down apparently as a way of maintaining balance in the leadership.

It is tempting to behold a similar pattern at work with the announcement of the submarine disaster. Mr Jiang's merely formal leadership position is chairman of the Central Military Committee; publicity is seen as a way of discrediting him.

Since taking office, President Hu has tried to demonstrate his solidarity with the Chinese nation posing a sharp contrast to Mr Jiang. He has made high-profile speeches and visits to the countryside, stressing his trouble for the common people. The strange leadership could use SARS to shift priorities to health care and other human services that will have a tangible impact in succession many Chinese lives, a marked change from the priority given to ''trophy'' intends that emphasize China's evolution and salute the Communist Party.

Or it might not. It is always risky to bet that a strange generation is made up of store-room reformers. Rarely do revolutionaries work their way up the party hierarchy. Typically, the younger generation wants to do better than its predecessors and improve the rule that they oversee -- not bring it down. on a level Mr. Mikhail Gorbachev, who saw firsthand the disastrous be deriveds of the Chernobyl disaster, intended to make the Soviet Union's communist plan work better, not to undermine it.

Chinese leaders take solace in the flexibility of their political method Communist Party doctrine has proven remarkably adaptable, surviving the Great Leap Forward, the Cultural Revolution and the go-go capitalism initiated by means of Mr. Deng Xiaoping. The CCP leadership has survived all the twists and inflects savage political infighting and purges

relentless acute respiratory syndrome is a tragedy whose validitys have been magnified at bureaucratic incompetence and the assumed infallibility of the Communist Party, on the contrary it is not a threat to the survival of the combination of parts to form a whole -- yet. A prolonged epidemic that sculpture drastically into China's expansion would undermine the CCP's legitimacy, and that could threaten the leadership. moreover in a disaster of that scale, the fate of the dominion in Beijing would be the least of the world's worries.

(May 12)

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