Catshanghai

This story will be welcome news to anyone living in China who has ever experienced the annoying indignity of being pushed out the way as they line up to buy a metro ticket. According to the BBC, a campaign has been launched to encourage local people to queue up in an orderly and polite fashion. The Beijing authorities want its people to give a good impression to foreign visitors during the 2008 Olympics. This is a big change from Mao’s time when politeness was derided as being bourgeois.

This is an issue that my friends in Shanghai discuss a lot. It’s going to take more than a campaign to change the cultural habits of a nation. You see traffic wardens at every crossing, but that doesn’ t stop chaos on the streets as jaywalkers, motorists and cyclists try to break the rules at every available opportunity. China has lots of anarchy for an authoritarian state. This manners campaign needs to be put in a wider context that Chinese people are actually very polite, but in a different way to Westerners. According to Chinesepod, etiquette in the Middle Kingdom works topsy turvy compared with Western mores. Here, people are very polite to friends and family, but less so to strangers. Jenny (my Shanghainese wife) has a different theory that China has so many people in its big cities that competition for resources and space leads to abrupt behaviour, particularly in Shanghai. Here, gentlemanly conduct offers no reward except for a loss of face as everyone laughs at you for being such a pushover. I knew I had started to behave like a local when I learnt how to use my elbows to push aside competitors trying to snag my ‘taxi’ during evening rush hour. Is that any worse than the survival mentality you encounter in other big cities around the world? Citizens in London, Paris and New York are not exactly renowned for being warm and polite to strangers.

Against a backdrop of mischievous chaos, recent history points to a China where cultural campaigns have been extraordinarily effective. During the Maoist era, there were drives to rid the countryside of sparrows and spitting became anti-social overnight during the 2003 Sars crisis. Hopefully, the 2008 Olympics will leave a lasting legacy that it is no longer socially acceptable to be selfish and jump queues. Until that time, adapting to the everyday sport of racing against ten million others to find an empty seat on the metro will remain a special part of living in Shanghai.

Links:
chinesepod.com,
newsimg.bbc.co.uk