UPDATE -- Last night I found a great billboard to go with the comments at the end of this, so it's now enclosed below:

With every passing day, life in Beijing is slowly getting back to normal. Yesterday, my wife and I biked downtown and came back along the second ring road, in the midst of the sort of traffic jam we haven't seen for a month. I can think of two exceptions. The first is that young children are really seldom to be seen on the streets (there was a good article describing this by Elisabeth Rosenthal in the New York Times yesterday -- http://www.nytimes.com/2003/05/20/international/asia/20BEIJ.html). The other exception is college students, who are still not allowed to pass in or out of the walls of their schools. That means that those who are in must stay in and those who are out can't get back. Students I talk to seem to be in a surprisingly good mood, considering, with an emphasis on the "considering." It's been a month since most of them have been able to set foot off campus, but at least classes are starting up.   

We biked downtown yesterday to get rid of a large accumulation of English books we've read this trip. We couldn't find the first place we were looking for, a secondhand bookstore that may have been razed, so we ended up in a very pleasant restaurant/bar/internet cafe in a hutong called the "Pass by bar" in English and "guo4 ke4" -- "transient visitor," in Chinese. It's in an old siheyuan or courtyard house, and it was very pleasant to sit outside and eat dinner. One of the real delights of hot places is outdoor shaded beer gardens and restaurants (hope Xiaobin has discovered that in San Antonio). As we left I noticed that the Chinese plaques outside said "Chinese Academy of Sciences Psychology Research Institute" and "Child Psychology Center." That was a big shock, because I work with people at a different "Chinese Academy of Sciences Psychology Research Institute." I didn't have much time to get to the bottom of this, but I did dash back in and ask someone about it. He insisted that it is indeed a "Child Psychology Center." I'm going to have dinner tonight with a child psychologist from the other place and I'll see if I can figure it out.

I read another interesting article online, this in the International Herald Tribune, "SARS as social mirror" http://www.iht.com/articles/97215.html, talking about how the Communist Party is taking credit and responsibility for every step in the fight against SARS. The article focuses on the weakness of a system where the central government needs to set policy on very minor issues that one would think could be better handled at a local level. They quoted Xu Jilin, a historian at East China Normal University, thus:

Xu said he worried that the government would draw the wrong lesson from the SARS crisis if it saw reassertion of authority as crucial to limiting the spread of disease. "The reality is just the opposite," he said. "People need to begin to see themselves as part of a community that depends on themselves rather than on the government."

It all reminds me of the section in the Taoist classic, Dao De Jing (Path to virtue scriptures) -- see http://www.clas.ufl.edu/users/gthursby/taoism/ttc-list.htm for all your Taoist translation needs. This is from Stan Rosenthal's translation:

The existence of the leader who is wise
is barely known to those he leads.
He acts without unnecessary speech,
so that the people say,
"It happened of its own accord".