One incident illustrated the issue well: on May 6th, a resident on Beijing's Anhua West Road saw that his apartment building's garbage chute was blocked, and no one had come to fix it. A phone call was made to the "Mayor's Hotline" . On the morning of the 7th, when he went down to buy groceries, he saw a group of people standing outside the apartment building. Among them was Acting Mayor Wang Qishan, who said he had come to see about the building's garbage chute. The resident was thrilled.
"I called the Municipal Party Committee yesterday," he said. "But I didn't think I'd actually get a response. Who would've thought the mayor would come out to help? And so quickly too!"
"There is no time like the present," replied Mayor Wang. "Sanitation is a big issue. If I can't even deal with your garbage problem, then what kind of mayor would I be?"
A 90% satisfaction rating isn't easy to get. Some say the fight against SARS brought the government and the people closer than ever—this seems like an astute observation.
The Beijing Municipal Party Committee office building is the headquarters of the anti-SARS campaign. Over the previous few days, I have come through its doors day and night for the purpose of conducting interviews. Often, as I entered the building, I got a profound sense of how endlessly busy everyone who worked there was. Even when they ate, they would have their lunchbox in one hand, and a cellphone in the other, taking work calls.
"It's like a warzone in here," functionaries would always say in response to my inquiries. There may not have been any gunfire, but they were indeed at war.
From April 20th onwards, every room and every member of the staff in the headquarters had become part of a combat unit. Everyone was on call 24 hours a day, from the Mayor and the Committee Secretary to the typists and admin staff. According to one staff member at the Press Office, one section chief's wife who had come to bring her husband a clean set of clothes and ended up waiting hours outside the building entrance—he had not been able to get off the phone for even a second to get his clothes.
Liang Wannian is the deputy chief of the city's Bureau of Health. He had taken up his post some months before. Now more than 70% of Beijing knew who he was. As the government's spokesperson on the epidemic, he has become an "anti-SARS TV star" . I met Liang, a former university vice-principal, at the Center for Disease Control for an interview. Sighing, he said something that made me pause.
"Back when I was a scholar, I always criticized the government. But since April 22nd, after I was appointed as an official and took part in the anti-SARS campaign, I have a whole new outlook on government workers. They're really great people."
Dr. Liang's sighs aren't for show. He is an example himself. After becoming deputy chief of the Bureau of Health some months ago, he is in charge of information on the city's epidemic.
"When I go to the bathroom," he said, "I have to bring my cellphone with me. If I lie down for a moment, I don't dare take my clothes off. The mayor calls me into the office in the middle of the night. The secretary tracks me down to discuss the epidemic situation with me in the early hours of the morning. This is my daily routine now. I'm used to it. All of the leadership is the same way. How can I neglect my duties, even for a second? Look at the photocopier in my office. At its peak, it saw over a thousand documents a day. The paper practically burnt my hand. It was so hot!"
The young deputy chief went through a baptism of fire the moment he entered the office—April 20th was a watershed moment for the anti-SARS campaign. Secretary Liu Qi and the newly appointed Acting Mayor Wang Qishan had conducted an expanded meeting of the Municipal Committee and the city's cadres the night before. In the early morning of the next day, two "commanders" arrived at the Center for Disease Control. When they found that the Center's network systems would not be sufficient, they started work on the site, establishing a network within only a few days. That network would later become known as the "Beijing Anti-SARS Lifeline" , a huge 24-hour information network for preventing and managing the SARS epidemic. They hoped that this network could reverse the misinformation and out of control that arose in the early stages of the epidemic.
Disease control's efficacy was reflected by the daily infection rate. Beijingers' worries about money, food, and housing were put aside, and they focused instead on Liang Wannian's daily infection rate reports.
"How did you arrive at these figures?" I asked.
"By my own work," Liang's eyes shined. "Every morning at 8:30 am I listened to reports from each CDC division chief, their situational summaries, and written analytical data from the past 24 hours. After I'd received the data, I notified several anti-SARS teams in the city and collected their feedback, adding it to my own information. Periodic trend changes were happening at all times. We published three main figures a day: the rate of new diagnoses, the rate of suspected cases, and the death rate. In fact, there were more than a dozen figures we wanted to collate and summarize. Each of those figures was changing constantly over 24-hour periods. Now, we have a digital network platform where HQ can get all sorts of figures across the city within minutes. The figures those officials in charge of information had to hand in weren't just the simple ones we released to the public.
