Canton, for over 1,000 years the great port of South China, lies on the delta of the Pearl River, in the centre of a broad rice-growing valley. A municipal paradox, the city's wide, clean boulevards lined with modern apartments and shops run parallel with filthy, unpaved alleys, so narrow that three people cannot walk abreast, lined with squalid one-story hovels. Fully one-third of the city's 1,000,000 Chinese live on dirty, water-logged sampans, jam-packed along the river fronts.
Last week, half of Canton's population had fled. The broad avenues were piled high with debris,...
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