BEIJING - For the past three weeks, friends and people I meet in Beijing have been watching Shanghai in horror, unable to fathom how China's most cosmopolitan city could be reduced to a sprawling ghost town and its residents confined to their homes with food rations.

In the first week, some still dismissed the Shanghainese' complaints of food shortages as nothing more than whining by an entitled lot who have had it good for a long time - best, in fact, compared to the rest of the country.