The interesting thing about a place like China is that it keeps you on your toes. You wake up one morning and the buildings beside yours are gone - replaced by some new, more modern, version of what was already there. When SARS hit Shanghai however, this normally fast-paced city grounded to a halt. And the sensitive SARS issue was made worse by the fact that, for the first time in Chinese history, the government was having an extremely difficult time controlling the spread of information. In the age of the Internet, and mobile phones, nearly anyone could tell another person, either within China, or around the world, what was going on at that moment. The article to the left describes how one owner of a 'net cafe' dealt with the government's feeble attempts to control the dissemination of information in order to keep his business from becoming yet another victim of the SARS outbreak.
