WANG CHEN was a rank-and-file staff member at the Beijing SARS treatment center. He pushed open the window behind his desk, looking out onto the heavy traffic on Chang'an Avenue.
"The first day I arrived at the headquarters," he said, downbeat, "I saw the Beijing I knew go completely empty in the space of just a night. I felt a tear roll down my cheek. It was such a desolate sight."
"Everybody in Beijing felt like that in those days," I told him. "We all wondered how a place as prosperous, and bustling, and modern as Beijing could become such a ghost town in the blink of an eye."
Those were dreadful days. The air resounded with a sickened gasping. People hurried through the fog, frenetic and frightened. It lasted for weeks. Was it April? The beginning of May? Mid-May?
Beijing, with no exaggeration, went through what felt like the moments before the sinking of the Titanic. Anyone who experienced this epidemic looks back on those painful days with grieving sighs.
On May 29th, the news broadcast information on the nationwide epidemic that China was facing. For the first time, Beijing had no new recorded cases of SARS. That evening, the people living below me let off a string of firecrackers in celebration. Setting off firecrackers was banned, but the long-suffering citizens of Beijing laughed, cheering on the offenders.
"It wasn't easy! We went from the first case, to a peak of 343 cases in one day, and now we're finally back to zero! It's all thanks to the leadership of the Party and the government!" A pious old woman in her seventies fell to her knees, prostrating herself in the direction of Tiananmen. The people in the square sighed. It wasn't easy. It felt like it had taken decades.
That day, many people in Beijing celebrated "zero" in their own way. Their beaming expressions announced to each other an irreversible fact: the day of Beijing's victory against SARS was at hand.
On May 31st, there was only one case of SARS diagnosed in the whole country—it was in Beijing. That month, Beijing saw the "zero" mark twice—as a city, and ultimately, as a nation. What the public did not know was that this "zero" was only made possible several days prior.
May 26th, Anti-SARS Campaign Headquarters
The meeting of Beijing's "SARS Prevention and Cure Working Group" came to this conclusion: on the early dawn of the 25th, a Volkswagen Santana carrying five people travelled from Shanxi province along a mountain highway in Yanqing county en route to Beijing. Among the passengers was a male AIDS patient. His illness had relapsed and he was running a high fever, so his fellow passengers were taking him to see a doctor in Beijing. Unexpectedly, upon being examined at Beijing's You'an hospital, he was diagnosed with SARS (on June 1st, his original diagnosis of SARS was revised). If it weren't for this unexpected arrival, Beijing would have been able to declare "zero" again that day.
The next day, in the headquarters' meeting room, the leadership and experts listened to a new presentation from the staff of the Beijing Center for Disease Control about this incident. After the report was finished, they sighed; they hadn't seen this coming.
I threw an intentional glance at Liu Qi the bureau chief, Committee Secretary. His face was solemn, but calm. I saw his gaze fixed on the screen, displaying an analysis of the new outbreak. His face remained still for at least two minutes.
I had no way of knowing what was going on in the head of the commander-in-chief of the anti-SARS campaign, but from his heavy gaze I was sure that he was waiting for something.
The meeting of the working group had gone on until nearly 10 pm on the evening of the 26th. I watched Secretary Liu depart the meeting and return to his office. Although I didn't know what time he eventually finished working, I would never have imagined that after this new issue had arisen for the anti-SARS team that evening, he would have set out at the break of dawn, travelling 110 kilometers away from the city into the mountains to inspect and supervise the team's work.
On the news the next day, Beijing residents saw Liu at a traffic intersection in Zhangshanying, a village on the border between Beijing and Shanxi. He was consulting, one-by-one, with the staff that had inspected the vehicle that had come through with the infected man. Since the launch of the anti-SARS campaign, Beijingers had seen Secretary Liu on TV plenty of times; no one seemed to pay attention to yet another inspection. But I felt unusually moved—I knew that he had come precisely because he felt he had let the previous day's "zero" slip through his fingers.
In the five days between the 27th and the 31st, I paid particular attention to the Beijing News. I watched Liu every day, reporting from rail stations, streets, communities, construction sites, suburbs, and rural villages. Unaware as they were of the details behind these reports, Beijingers did not know that the city had found its way to "zero" twice since March during that week, a noteworthy accomplishment.
Not that long ago, Beijingers had grave concerns about ignorance and reproach toward the epidemic—this had led to the resignation of the city's mayor, Meng Xuenong, just a few months after taking office. But as the epidemic was nearly beaten, how did Beijingers feel about their government now? The Du Deyin Municipal Committee Deputy Secretary gave me a figure: a satisfaction rating of 90%.
I don't think this figure was an exaggeration. The citizens who lived through Beijing's life-or-death struggle had little desire to save face for those in power; indeed, Beijingers are quite particular on such matters. The citizens paid close attention each day to the epidemic occurring in their own city, and stay informed on the situation going on around them; this certainly permitted them to voice even the slightest dissatisfaction.
