Friday my wife and I rented a small electric boat and motored around Qianhai and Houhai, two very scenic lakes downtown in Beijing. It's turning into a very pleasant area, with small bars and coffee shops along the lake side. A Starbucks is in the process of going up, so that's a sure sign of gentrification.

Afterwards, we had dinner in a small roast meat restaurant, where you cook slices of marinated meat over coals. The food was delicious, although I was also very impressed with all the signs that the owner had placed all over the store, including this one

which translates as: If you don't work hard today, tomorrow you will be working hard looking for a job. 

That's as good a sign as any of just how much the economy has changed in the time I've been coming to China. The first few times I visited, in the 1980s, service in stores was very lackadaisacal, at best, stores were all owned by the state, and restaurants had very little variety in the food they served. Produce was limited -- I still remember the site of bok choy (called aiguo baicai -- "patriotic bok choy" after people didn't want to eat it any more) piled high on the sidewalks in October. People would buy enormous amounts of it and eat it through the winter as their main vegetable (it had the advantage that you could throw out the outer leaves that had dried out and eat the part that was still okay). Things have changed so quickly that I was surprised to realize that a young graduate student who grew up in Beijing didn't even realize that there had been a food ration card system when she was a preschooler.

Having seen all that from a distance, it's not too surprising that people are so optimistic that they'll conquer SARS and the sanitation, political, and social problems that it's revealed. I don't know that they're right -- it's easier to solve by policy changes problems that were caused by policies than it is to conquer a disease by changing policies -- but I think the whole world hopes they're right.