Behind the Great Wall

When you live in a country of 1.4 billion people (give or take a couple of hundred million), it’s crowded. Just the city of Beijing has 22 million people officially, but the unofficial total is closer to 30 million people. More accurate figures will be available at the end of this year, because like the US, China is conducting a 2010 census.

Anyway, some societies (like Japan) deal with crowding by building complex and hyper-cooperative societies. There are rules for everything in Japan. They’re conscientiously obeyed, and they’re strictly enforced (mostly by peer pressure). For example, if you use your cell phone on a train in Japan, people will look at you as if you just took a dump in the middle of the floor (in China, taking a dump in the middle of the floor wouldn’t raise too many eyebrows–at least if you’re a child). People line up in an orderly fashion for everything. And everywhere, it’s meticulously clean. Japanese people don’t even think of littering–it’s discourteous. If it happens by accident, it’s cleaned up promptly. And if you and a friend want to have a wild passionate screaming shake the walls lovemaking session, there are soundproofed love hotels for this. Incidentally, Japanese people have the craziest, kinkiest fetishes ever, possibly because they have this outlet for their inhibitions.

And then there’s China. It’s even more crowded here than Japan, but instead of a complex and hyper-cooperative society, everything here is like a middle school cafeteria during the lunch rush. If there’s a line, you’d better push hard and be ready for someone to cut in front of you. This happens to me every morning at the subway, where people constantly try to jump ahead of me in the security queue. Getting off the subway requires you to push your way through a crowd of people who refuse to stand aside, because they might get on the subway three seconds earlier if they don’t cooperate. If a seat opens up on the subway in front of an elderly grandmother, a young slick business guy will slip into the seat while she’s still turning around to lower herself into it. And if you want to get rid of something, just throw it on the ground. Nobody will pick it up after you, but it’ll eventually find its way into a gutter somewhere, or maybe one of the gaping potholes that dot the pavement here. The only thing that China does the same is love hotels, although they maintain a veneer of propriety by renting rooms by the hour for “quiet study” or “business meetings,” depending on the neighborhood.

On and off, the Chinese government tries to encourage its citizens to behave more cooperatively. There was a campaign before the Olympics, and on subway Line 10 videos are shown to encourage people to use the subways more efficiently. These efforts have varying degrees of effectiveness, usually tied to enforcement. However, it seems to be situational; the same behavior traits in the subway also apply at McDonald’s, for example. Enforcement campaigns in the subway don’t lead to better behavior in similar situations elsewhere.

Will Chinese people ever cooperate? It’s hard to know. In this culture, behavior we’d consider rude and boorish is the norm. The important thing is to leave aside your expectations of propriety and decorum. If you want something here, you have to scrap to get ahead–and if you don’t, you’ll get run over.