With all the hubbub surrounding China's admission to the World Trade Organization late last year, its nearly simultaneous acceptance into another "WTO" went unnoticed.
But when China quietly became a member of the World Toilet Organization last November, the impact on ordinary Beijingers was more immediate, at least on people like Liu Zhong, a 77-year-old retired cafeteria worker.
In keeping with China's agreements with the toilet organization, Beijing authorities have been spending millions of dollars upgrading public restrooms, including the toilets that Liu has long called his own -- because his gray-brick courtyard home, like so many in the capital, lacks its own bathroom.
For decades, Liu has trekked to the drab and odoriferous neighborhood outhouse, where the toilets were several 15cm-wide slits in the floor, separated by low concrete partitions. But that has now been replaced by a spotless tile and chrome facility, with porcelain flush toilets and lockable stalls, and even with heaters in winter.
"It's like the difference between heaven and earth," he said as he emerged adjusting his trousers, just down the block from the Confucius Temple.
While China has made breathtaking strides in industry and technology, its bathroom science has lagged sadly behind. In much of China, the standard toilet is still a concrete pit -- even in fancier restaurants and Internet bars. In the countryside it is often a platform over the pigsty.
But now, it seems, China's government and its people are turning enthusiastic attention to this long-neglected aspect of life: Public toilets in the capital are being lavishly renovated, then studiously inspected and rated.
With a growing demand for new houses, rows of spanking new bathroom appliances now dominate interior-design stores. Tabloids and bookstore advertisements suggest books for people to read when they are on the toilet.
"The Chinese government is aware of the urgent need to improve public toilets and are doing their part with increasing intensity." said Jack Sim, who lists himself as a founding member of the World Toilet Organization, a nonprofit group based in the famously clean city-state of Singapore.
To reward China's efforts, the WTO has agreed to hold the World Toilet Congress in Beijing in 2004. The only stipulation is that China continue upgrading its public toilets, because, Sim says, the country still has a long way to go.
"Chinese toilets have been neglected for a very long time," he said.
For apartment dwellers, who generally have their own toilets, the new obsession has prompted them to flock to home-improvement stores. In the bathroom department of "Around the Third Ring" -- a vast, trendy furniture depot on Beijing's Third Ring Road -- a 58-year-old woman who identified herself only as Teacher Tao was busy laying out wads of cash to remedy a lifetime of bathroom neglect.
Tao recalled toilets she had used over the years: From 1944 to 1968, when she lived in the countryside, her toilet was a wooden box that was emptied into the river. In 1968, she moved into a factory-owned apartment in Beijing, where the bathroom consisted of a sink and a porcelain squatter.
It was not until 1994 that she got her first sit-down toilet, in a tiny concrete room retrofitted with a nozzle high on a wall that served as a shower -- but that doused the entire room each time it was turned on.
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