SARS, what SARS?
One of the things I was really curious about this time is what lasting effects of the SARS experience I would see in Beijing. I guess it’s a mark of the resilience of this place that the answer is that one is hard put to find any visible signs.
There are a few security restrictions that weren’t there before—the ugly fence in the middle of the BNU campus separating the student and faculty areas is still there, although there are ample ways to get through it. In the area where Fang Ge lives, you can’t enter through the East gate, but need to go all the way around to the South entrance.
Other than that, nothing’s really changed. The practices adopted in the Spring, such as putting soap in restrooms on campus, seem all to be gone. I never noticed any real decrement in spitting, and it’s certainly as popular an avocation now as it ever was.
I’ve been keeping an eye out for a SARS poster or related sign, but I came up a blank. There were a bunch of SARS posters on the jetway when we came back from Shenzhen, but those were the only ones I’ve seen. I thought about taking a picture of the billboard in Zhongguancun that featured the fist and the slogan about how SARS would be overcome thanks to the Party’s leadership, but there’s been so much construction there that I’m not even sure where the billboard was. If it’s there, it now features either an ad for Texas Instruments’ DLP projection systems or an ad for China’s Aigo (in Pinyin “Aiguo”, or “Patriot”) computer systems (“built in your country, built for your life”).
It may be that there are deeper changes that I can’t see, and certainly it’s the case that things like the airport health monitoring and the neighborhood committees have been revived and are ready to spring into action if need be. But it’s still remarkable to me how little obvious impact there is from an event that shut down an entire city for many weeks.