Posted on 05/03/2003 2:29:48 PM PDT by Dog Gone
BEIJING, May 3 (UPI) -- For all of humanity's technical achievements there are still two basic emotional responses to fear: flight or fight. The Beijing municipality, an area of about 7,600 square miles, is showing signs of both behaviors in face of severe acute respiratory syndrome, or SARS.
An eerie tranquility reigns over portions of the city proper, many of its residents having already fled or have opted en masse to stay indoors. Where it would normally teem with tourists foreign and domestic during the May Day holiday, one of three "Golden Week" periods adopted in 1999 to stimulate domestic consumption, the Chinese capital echoes empty.
Beijing's background hum, a cacophony of car horns and construction drills, has gone largely silent. The chaotic ingress and egress of economic progress, snarled traffic of a city in the last throes of wiping out its historical patterns of single-story structures and alleys -- many dating from the Mongol and Ming periods, now stamped with broad boulevards and glass-clad skyscrapers -- is missing.
Beijing streets are usually a melee where a growing glut of auto drivers jostles for space on roads and sidewalks with pedestrians, pedi-cabs, bikes, buses, trucks and the rare horse cart.
While the lack of people is unnerving, the lack of motor vehicles makes the capital a delight to travel around by bicycle, much as it was when I first lived here in the late 1980s. There were 60,000 registered cars in Beijing in 1988, none privately owned. Today the figure tops 1.3 million, with many driven, and badly, by increasingly affluent individuals of China's nascent middle class.
The unnatural calm within the swirling concentric circles of the city's three completed ring roads makes me imagine being in the eye of a hurricane. In stark contrast is the growing storm among the municipality's surrounding peasant population.
Rural residents are blocking roads into the mountainous terrain marking the end of the North China plain, which Beijing commands. Where the capital's economic reform has failed to penetrate, life at the best of times is a struggle to make ends meet.
And in these SARS-filled days the instinct here is to fight rather than flee, especially since there is nowhere to go. Urbanites, Chinese and foreigners alike coming along in their cars are not welcomed. It can be downright menacing to travel as far as the Great Wall, less than 90 minutes away.
Indeed, lower education levels and poor sanitation in rural areas make SARS a potential powder keg for Chinese politics as well as health if the epidemic strikes the countryside. Right now the best the government can do is issue thermometers and travel warnings not to leave the city.
The genie is out of the bottle on SARS thanks to technology's ability to spread information and disease alike. China has shown it can't conceal the specter of plague it once did with a famine killing upwards of 30 million people some four decades ago. Now telephone access and television are widespread in China, and Chinese can both tune in and dial out for information.
Unlike the million-plus cases of AIDS in China, world pressure is being brought to bear on the Middle Kingdom over SARS, probably partly because it is new and partly because its transmission is still unclear. Global confidence and investment in China is at risk unless the truth is told by Chinese authorities from local to national. Without it, ignorance and the fear it engenders pose the gravest threat to Communist rule since it was founded in the mid-20th century.
As an urban peasant, I prefer to fight the SARS wave with humor and information as my weapons of choice. The jokes that include some fake coughing are great fun. My panic shopping thus far has consisted of buying a carton of cigarettes that are not my favorite brand.
I tell fellow reporters to be careful of SARS2 -- Severely Agitated Reporter Syndrome. It's a journo-virus for which there is no known cure. Fortunately, it can be brought into remission with regular doses of timely, accurate and truthful data from official sources. Beijing, like all political capitals, will always be risky places for an outbreak of SARS2.
One unintended consequence of SARS is that my face has become a minor feature on Chinese state television. After spotting me pose questions at the six televised press briefings on SARS so far, strangers have approached me on the street for information and friends I haven't seen for years call to say: "I saw you, get some exercise and go on a diet."
After living in Beijing for 12 years, the longest I've been in any one spot, it feels better to laugh than cry over what's happening in my second hometown. China has worked extremely hard and sacrificed so much to get this point. It would be a shame to see it all unravel because of officialdom's inability to think globally and act locally. Perhaps Mao Zedong's dictum of "a single spark can ignite a prairie fire" still means something.
I'm sure losing weight seems less urgent if you're in the midst of a fatal epidemic.
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