Diggingtochina’s Weblog

The dons of one of Beijing’s most prestigious universities are nervous. Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome, the flu-like illness that appears to have gone forth and multiplied from southern China, has forced them to effectively lock down the campus and confine thousands of students to barracks. Under these extreme circumstances, too many members of the student body have started displaying some very worrying behaviour – they’re spending a lot of time indoors playing cards and computer games. To try to head off the moral threat posed by these activities, the administration is organising choral concerts and non-academic paper chases. They are also handing out free kites.

Across town, a corporate giant is doing something he has never done before, he’s taking a month-long holiday. With his empire in limbo, he’s making the most of the sunny days and empty freeways by driving out to the countryside. On the way back, he cruises through parts of Beijing he’s never visited.

Elsewhere in the city, two married frequent fliers are grounded. They usually cross paths in airport lounges but now they’re at home spending real quantity time with their young child.

One of 140,000 taxi drivers is not so fortunate. His wife has told him to cut back on the time he spends on the road or stay away from their frail son. He’s sleeping in the back of his cab until he can mark his own version of Passover.

The Chinese capital has been described as a ghost town and a city gripped by fear. Death stalks the alleyways. Health authorities grapple with an apocalyptic plague. A million people flee the city. It’s true the bulk of commercial life is on hold and shoppers are not embracing consumption with anything like their previous enthusiasm. Anxieties about contamination have surfaced in the form of masks, clouds of cleansing incense and increasingly popular surgical gloves. People have used text messages to let each other know about SARS hot spots, the coming imposition of martial law and the key role smoking plays in preventing the illness. One day, lunch came with a free vial of royal jelly.

But, SARS is losing its power to telescope attention. Last month, the rumours about the disease mutated and spread with greater ferocity than the illness itself. At my workplace, the word was that somebody in the building had it and he was in critical condition. Then he died, only to come back to life. He infected somebody else, sixteen people, seven people. They were all in quarantine. Then he died again. All within a couple of hours. Last week two people on the seventh floor were actually diagnosed with the illness. The result was barely a Chinese whisper.

In this atmosphere, there’s room for distraction. The Lotus Man recently responded to an urgent text message from a colleague that the work unit had taken delivery of some anti-SARS eggs. He arrived to find the colleague was having him on.

A Beijing woman born in the nation’s west has a theory that the spread of SARS points to greater cosmic forces at play. She says the year of the sheep is traditionally the worst in the Chinese calendar and things are just balancing out after Beijing won the bid to host the 2008 Olympics and China became a World Trade Organisation member. Her friend forecast the realignment last year but she didn’t take much notice of it then.

So what if a similar correction is in store for Perth? What do you do if SARS does come to Duncraig? There is one home remedy you can try to guard against the disease’s onset. Make a soup of pears, beans, cabbage and white radish. A Beijing sceptic suggests adding a bit of meat.

It’s summer on a mountaintop in Hebei province near the remains of the Great Wall. About 20 mostly elderly farmers are still getting by growing crops and raising chickens. The chickens roam the village and the roosters defy stereotype by making a noise all through the night, not just at dawn’s crack. So how do the farmers know which chickens are theirs? Apparently they don’t – it’s the chickens who know which farmer belongs to them.