Eye on China: Cleaning up its act since Sars

Despite the similarities of bird flu to Sars, the potential global pandemic that brought China to a stop in 2003, the atmosphere in Beijing is far calmer.

Traffic still snarls up the roads, commuters flock to work and nobody is wearing a mask.

How different to that summer two years ago, when the new Government of Hu Jintao and Wen Jiabao abruptly fired several top officials, including the Minister for Health, on the grounds that they had been concealing the true number of Sars cases.

The Government's hand had partly been forced by the publication of a critical letter from a distinguished Chinese doctor in the Western press.

The parallels between then and now are instructive. The Government appears to be acting in a more open manner and is being praised by the World Health Organisation for its co-operation.

That could help to prevent a repeat of the near-panic that erupted during Sars. When people realised they had been lied to, China's urban residents decided to take things into their own hands.

They stopped going to work, hotels and restaurants emptied and the streets became blessedly quiet. It was a time of beautiful weather and the days passed like a succession of quiet Sundays.

Although many foreigners went for extended stays in the southern and western parts of the country, away from the densely populated cities, I felt bemused by the whole thing and didn't stir from Beijing.

I went to the office every day, gazed out over the empty streets and exchanged an occasional greeting with colleagues dashing in to pick up some personal item or another.

To me, the whole thing appeared to be totally hysterical. At the time, my bicycle was my main form of transport and the statistic that most concerned me was the thousands of traffic fatalities in Beijing every year, not a handful of people going down with something like the flu.

I remember my shock at meeting a Chinese friend and reaching out to shake his hand. He shrank away with a look of fear and disgust. He had a wife and baby and was clearly terrified of running any risk of contamination.

The crisis had some benefits. Spitting almost became a thing of the past in Shanghai, as the savvy Shanghainese came to the realisation that hygiene was not just a silly Western luxury.

In earthier Beijing, even the panic of Sars could not bestir the population to clean up its act. True to their post-1949 peasant roots, the mass of the people continued to live in conditions of friendly squalor.

I remember snapping at an old woman shortly after the crisis who had spat close to my foot. It was because Sars was still fresh in people's mind, perhaps, that the husband sitting beside her apologised to me and berated her, but such an attitude was not to last.

The Chinese attitude to dirt is quite interesting. In Taiwan, many wealthy people have adopted the ultra-clean habits of the American bourgeoisie. But public areas, in contrast, can be squalid.

Shanghai is rapidly closing the gap with the West. Beijing and the rest of the country are still largely stuck in the old ways.

But if you compare Chinese attitudes with the hygiene-obsessed Germans and Japanese, it becomes almost reassuring. Once you get fixated on germs, it is easy to become focused on exclusion and purity.

That was the case in fascist Germany and Japan; both countries became fanatically intolerant of foreign "dirty" elements.

In contrast, China has historically (discounting the atypical Maoist period) had a more tolerant attitude to outside elements. Foreign nations were welcome to trade.

Wars - and there were many of them - were premised on securing borders and protection from the fierce nomadic tribes. They were not ideological wars of extermination like the Germans in Eastern Europe and their African colonies, or the Japanese in Asia.

It will be interesting to see to what extent the recent gradual improvement in China's hygiene is mirrored by the rise of Chinese nationalism.

That nationalism is closely tied to its Army, a body hero-worshipped for supposedly expelling the Japanese from China in World War II.

Armies have a fetish for cleanliness and order that can feed into nationalist fantasies of exclusivity, hierarchy and dominance.

So next time you come to China and turn up your nose at some example of filth, comfort yourself with the essentially tolerant message it represents - at least for now.

* The writer remains anonymous to protect his position in China.