"It's an English plot," said the Beijing poultry dealer in long green coat as he slit the throat of a chicken and threw it into a bucket. "The English planted the virus in Hong Kong before they left."
"Anyway," he went on, the flaps of his furlined hat shaking as he waved his knife angrily in the air, "I don't believe the stories about people dying from chicken flu. People die because it is their destiny. People die after having a meal. Who knows what they die from?"
At least the dealer in the Big Bell Temple poultry wholesale market in north Beijing knew about the so-called "bird flu", the H5N1 strain of avian influenza which has killed four people in Hong Kong and infected 11 others, including a three-year-old boy diagnosed yesterday.
It turned out, however, that this was because a western TV crew had been to his stall asking the same questions.
At another booth nearby, where the ground was thick with chicken guts, wet blood, feathers, and accumulated bird droppings, the workers did not know about the health scare in Hong Kong or that 1.3 million poultry had been slaughtered there this week to try to stamp out the virus.
"I think it's impossible for people to die of bird flu," said a young man resting his bloodstreaked arms on cages packed with brown and white hens. "There was chicken pest here once and the poultry couldn't be sold. Then we ate it ourselves. Nothing happened to us."
It was the same elsewhere in Beijing. Shoppers crowding into Double Peace retail market to buy fruit, vegetables, meat, and live fish in basins of water seemed to know nothing about the news from Hong Kong.
At the end of a long alley slippery with mud, spit and halfmelted ice, a father and son from Hebei province selling 25 hens and 17 pigeons from a tin hut said they hadn't heard a thing about chicken flu.
"I hope we don't get that around here," said the younger of the two as the caged hens pecked at cabbage leaves.
Beijing people, including those most at risk, seem in ignorance of the Hong Kong virus, which has alarmed people throughout the world. There is no firm evidence that the virus has found an easy way to spread among humans, which would be the first sign of an epidemic, or that it is present outside the Hong Kong area, but the danger of it spreading is such that flights from Hong Kong to Beijing are now being sprayed with disinfectant.
The officially-controlled Chinese media has carried next to nothing about the story or the need for precautions.
"Communist governments always play down news which might reflect on the country's competence or alarm the population," a diplomat said. "Remember when Chernobyl happened in the Soviet Union, the whole world knew of the radiation dangers except for the people most affected who lived there."
Many Hong Kong health workers believe that the virus originated in the area of southern China which supplied the former British colony with 75,000 chickens a day until an export ban was imposed on December 24th.
Xinhua, the official Chinese News Agency, said however "no cases of H5N1 virus infection have been discovered in the inland areas [of China]", citing experts with China's National Influenza Centre.
It did not say if the virus had been discovered in coastal areas near Hong Kong.
It is not known if Chinese officials have tested human blood samples but Xinhua said extra surveillance measures had been taken since August, especially in the cities of Guangzhou and Shenzhen near Hong Kong and that "there is no need to panic about the possibility of an epidemic".
Big Chinese poultry firms insist they are not to blame. An official at Shenzhen-based Wabao said "the chickens we raise have not been found to have bird flu and none has been found in Shenzhen so far".
In Shenzhen people can hear radio and TV broadcasts from Hong Kong and because of this fewer people are eating chicken, said an official from Shaoguan Jiahao Co Ltd, which has lost poultry sales to the former British colony.
In Beijing, a Kentucky Fried Chicken outlet was crowded at lunchtime yesterday, with customers unaware that chicken had become a bad word in Hong Kong. "There is no drop in business at all," said the manager. In Hong Kong health officials said yesterday they had begun testing cats and dogs for the virus.
Yesterday the Agricultural and Fisheries Department admitted that some 90,000 chickens had yet to be killed, saying: "We are still carrying out mopping up operations."