Two lighter stories yesterday, one which made the newspaper, the other which didn't, nicely highlighted the differences between Beijing and Shanghai, I thought.

Pandas are not always so huggable

The story that made the paper was the curious incident of the panda in the day-time - the drunk visitor to Beijing from Henan who decided to go panda-hugging at the zoo and got mauled. He bit back, providing a memorable Chinese equivalent to the old newsman's dictum that while dog bites man isn't news, man bites dog is.

The story that didn't make was a survey of modern Shanghai life which revealed that the thing locals liked least about living there was their own habit of going out in their pyjamas. Now this is a common habit all over China, of course.

Certainly, the morning and evening summer scenery in my own alley is locals of all ages, admittedly most prominently those on the wrong side of 45, heading off to the bath-house, the loos, or even the kebab stand in their nightgear. Afterwards, they take the evening air with their friends, and play Chinese chess, similarly attired.

The Shanghai dislike of this is not because they don't do it - 41 per cent of respondents to the survey said family members were guilty some or all of the time.

But clearly there is a more uptight Shanghai, that anyone who has strolled down HuaiHai Lu has noticed strongly on display: leave the past, and the elderly, and the local behind; we are not Chinese, we are international, we belong to a cosmopolitan country called London-Hong Kong-New York-Paris-Frankfurt-Shanghai, which is where our Armani carrier bags tell us we live. We DON'T go out in our pyjamas. Ever.

The common complaints of Beijingers or foreign residents of the capital in such surveys - spitting, queue-barging, smelly taxis, street sellers hassling you to buy fake DVDs - do not appear in the Shanghai survey list. I assume that this is because both surveyors and Shanghainese would refuse to acknowledge such style crimes exist there.

Compare that with the treatment of Mr Zhang, the man who embarrassed himself in the panda enclosure. I half expected to see a diatribe about the dangers of drunkenness, or the uncouthness of the residents of Henan (where he came from; often the butt of country bumpkin type jokes), or how embarrassing it was to have someone show himself up like this somewhere lots of foreign
tourists go. But no. He was taken to hospital, patched up, and let go.

No charge of being drunk and disorderly, or breach of the peace, or any of the things that I suspect would have got him a caution if not a visit to the magistrates in Britain. Just one of those things, the newspaper treatment seemed to say, nothing special, bit of a laugh, bit of an idiot. Something to brighten the endless toil of life. Fansong fansong - relax, relax, as no-one would ever say in Shanghai.

On the other hand, imagine if a survey of foreigners found that people wearing pyjamas in Beijing's hutongs was one of THEIR biggest gripes about the city? The new vogue term in the Chinese blogosphere is the Internet Mob- angry online groups who gather to maul adulterers, cat-killers, dislikable foreigners etc.

Imagine the Internet Mob that would go after foreigners if we tried to question the inalienable right of Aunty Zhou to sit with her friends in the neighbourhood committee watching the world go by in her floral nightie every evening? Angry youth would have nothing on it. Of course, substitute "Shanghainese" for "foreigners" and I suspect the rage would be even worse.

P.S. Do I wear pyjamas out now I live in a hutong? That's for you to find out.