Sars sows doubts among jubilant Chinese

By Adam Brookes BBC Beijing correspondent

For China's capital, normality beckons. The lifting of the World Health Organisation's (WHO) warning against travel to Beijing has been met by the city's people with enormous relief.

Beijing residents hope life will return to normal now

And the city's removal from the WHO list of Sars-affected areas is restoring the capital's battered confidence.

"I'm really excited," one girl on the street told me. "I can see my friends again, go out, travel."

"Tonight," said one distinguished professor, "I intend to have a meal in a restaurant for the first time in two months."

As the WHO made the announcement at a press briefing, journalists burst into applause.

I used to believe everything the government told me. But now, after Sars, I will weigh everything the government says very carefully

Beijing Sars victim

Television screens in department stores and restaurants drew curious and excited crowds.

The internet came alive. Text messages flashed around town.

Shocked city

Everyone seemed to know almost instantly that Beijing had a clean bill of health - a powerful demonstration of how fast information travels in China these days.

Guarding against Sars has become a way of life in Beijing

And information - its control, the uses to which it's put - is the key to understanding the effects of China's encounter with Sars.

Sars, we now know, first appeared in China back in November last year. But it was months before the Chinese Government acknowledged the scale of the problem.

Only in April - and after a stern lecture from the WHO, and the public statements of a brave whistleblower - did Beijing come clean about the number of cases in the capital.

In a political bloodletting, the city's mayor and the health minister were sacked, ostensibly for covering up the scale of the epidemic.

SARS WORLDWIDE

Known death tolls:

World: 812

Mainland China: 348

Hong Kong: 298

Taiwan: 84

Singapore: 32

Canada: 38

Source: WHO/local authorities

Global update

There were, in reality, nine times the number of infections previously admitted to by Beijing's authorities.

Information was coming thick and fast now, and Beijing's residents were shocked at how they'd been misled.

For a few weeks there was something approaching panic here.

People stockpiled food and cowered in their homes. The streets were eerily empty. Public places of entertainment closed. Schools shut down.

The city reeked of disinfectant.

Massive propaganda

But it's a function of a China's Communist party-state that when it wants to act, it can.

China's Communist Party praised military medics for their efforts

A massive propaganda effort got underway.

State-controlled media flooded people's homes with information about Sars and how to avoid infection.

Nationwide surveillance and quarantining began. And the number of new infections began falling away - much more rapidly than many thought possible.

The WHO - once China's sternest critic - is now praising China for its "excellent work" in containing the disease.

The government has been quick to let the world know where the credit should go.

"Victory in the fight against Sars came from the leadership of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China and State Council; from the strong support of the People's Liberation Army, armed police force, and departments of the central government," began a statement from the deputy mayor, Wang Qishan.

New criticism

Beijing's businessmen and bankers, taxi drivers and touts, its hotel managers, cooks, merchants of knock-off DVDs, peddlers and pickpockets are now breathlessly awaiting the return of the investors and the tourists who've stayed away.

There's a lot of ground to be made up.

But many among this city's 13 million people are also engaged in a quiet, intense questioning of their recent experience.

For one thing, the epidemic has brought home just how much China's fate is interconnected with that of other countries.

Emerging viruses are, after all, as much a symptom of globalisation as airplanes and credit cards.

And a new scepticism is in the air.

One Sars victim said to me: "I used to believe everything the government told me. But now, after Sars, I will weigh everything the government says very carefully, and I'll judge how much of it is true."

Sars has left Beijing's people a little harder to persuade.

The epidemic, in and of itself, is unlikely to lead to profound changes in the way China's Communist Party rules.

But it may have fostered the growth of a public critique that, over time, the party will be hard put to ignore.