THE online frenzy over a video clip showing the mistreatment of an old ragman on a city bus has stoked shamefaced guilt among locals.

The clip shows a confrontation between the 81-year-old carrying bags stuffed with empty bottles, scrap paper and other garbage and the bus driver and a male passenger on the No. 82 bus in Pudong New Area on August 6.

As soon as the garbage collector stepped aboard and paid his fare, they ordered him to get off, citing his body odor and pungent smell of his belongings.

When he refused, saying the garbage represented his money, the two decided to play it tough. Despite his resistance, they wrested the bags from him and tossed them out of the open bus door.

The old man rushed to salvage the trash scattered about the carriage and the street outside. He was later heard consoling himself that the loss was no more than 5 yuan (73 US cents). He didn't curse or retaliate.

Throughout the fracas no one except the furious duo voiced any objection at traveling with a rag picker. Besides, the bus was almost empty, which meant the poor scavenger couldn't have been a great annoyance.

In Friday's Oriental Morning Post, the old man surnamed Wu was quoted as saying that he avoided taking buses during rush hour when out collecting garbage so his stinky load would affect as few people as possible.

One-upmanship

The retiree from a state-owned shipping company told the newspaper that he did this also to support his family, since none of his four children had a stable and well-paid job.

Compared to his consideration for others, the two bouncers' intolerance of his livelihood is truly outrageous.

In daily life, the duo may not behave like the bullies they were in the bus saga. And they are not necessarily mean-spirited people. The incident reveals a lot more than their lack of respect for senior citizens.

One-upmanship is common among locals, long notorious for their tendency to look down upon Chinese from the provinces. Even though many online comments were acutely critical of the harassment of an old man, I suspect many who expressed outrage would react the same way with a pauper who stinks, or a migrant worker who walks into a five-star hotel.

In fact, their attitude toward scavengers and disheveled migrants can be gauged during commutes. Bus and metro passengers deliberately keep a "safe" distance between themselves and migrants carrying dirty burlap sacks - it's as though they fear their skin would blister on contact with the migrants.

In the streets, when we see scavengers scouring trash bins for recyclable items, some hold our noses and scurry past.

There have been reports saying some expats and locals felt uncomfortable at the sight of scavengers rummaging through garbage with a hook, or gloved hands, on busy pedestrian streets flanked by glitzy shopping malls.

Although people seldom appreciate their scavenger service, it is something the city cannot do without. Since Shanghai is seriously lacking in effective measures to sort rubbish, the city's only garbage incinerator is always overwhelmed and landfills are overflowing with trash that cannot be burned.

The scavengers are thus doing us a favor by reducing the size of bulging landfills at our doorstep, however small their compensation. Yet we urbanites are ungrateful and believe these "eyesores" should be removed, sometimes with force if necessary.

Who are really noisome, us or them?

We don't feel any pangs of conscience when speaking contemptuously of menial laborers, be they construction workers, vegetable hawkers or couriers, because of our sanitized view of the city landscape - devoid of obvious piles of junk and refuse.

In the not-too-distant past when a flush toilet was a novelty, every morning night soil dealers went door to door in old neighborhoods to collect human feces. A shipload was then ferried to the countryside as fertilizers.

Many would now retch at the idea that the vegetables and fruits they consume are nurtured by excrement. Thanks to improved public sanitation, we are now freed from the choking stench every morning. Still, disgust strengthens popular aversion to farming - an already stigmatized way of life - of which many know practically nothing beyond the packaged produce on supermarket shelves.

Newest, fastest, biggest

When city dwellers are accustomed to superlatives, like the newest, fastest and biggest, that are used to hype urban amenities, they either endorse them more fervently or become indifferent.

I count myself among the latter group. In his letter, reader Sanjay Kumar writes of the many little nice things about Shanghai that usually escape PR films promoting the metropolis to visitors. His cheerful writings remind us that a city doesn't need a forest of surreal skyscrapers and upscale boutiques to be inviting and beautiful.

Great cities charm with their lively, human feel, which only comes from the familiar relationships among people, not by their superlative material progress.

Urbanization is unstoppable, it's something a reporter like me and my intellectually inclined colleague Wan Lixin cannot hope to halt with our words. While it can be argued that many accompanying problems of urbanization - the pressure of mass migration on cities' welfare system, soaring housing prices and possibly higher crime rates, to name a few - are global (I believe India has experienced similar dislocations), China's approach to them is sometimes questionable.

Take the slum issue. Slums are a natural by-product of urbanization. Notwithstanding their general squalor, they provide a temporary shelter for low-income people and squatters.

During scholarly debates on the future trajectory of China and India, Chinese researchers are wont to raise the issue of slums and slum clearance as "evidence" of China's superiority to India, for China has no slums, which, truth be told, is a dubious claim.

China's drive to pulverize every last one of them - for the sake of having a brighter calling card - and the fact that "slum" is replaced in official documents by the politically correct word "shantytown" reflect how pathetically eager we are to cast everything about our city in a rosier light.

Recently I learned that a district in western Shanghai aims to be honored as one of China's most "civilized and immaculate administrative districts" in a national survey. To support their bid, officials boast that the district is not saddled with a "historic liability," meaning shantytowns yet to be demolished.

The vision of a sanitized, manicured city, with neither slums nor scavengers, is as fallacious as it is misleading.

When this delusion led two people to lord it over a fellow citizen on a bus, Shanghai risked being seen as an insular city, with its cosmopolitan aspirations so close, and yet so far from realization.