February 8, 2007 11:41

Spit for Thought--Part I

Posted by Susan Jakes | Comments (11) | Permalink | Trackbacks (0) | Email This

Another new development in Beijing's Olympic prepations. Again big headlines, big news: Beijing is launching a campaign to get people to stop spitting and form orderly lines. Yes, here we go again. Another year, another campaign against the spittists. This year's version will feature fines of 50 yuan, as well less-punitive measures like "Queing Day," a celebration of forming straight lines, which will be held near Tiananmen Square this Sunday.

When I first moved to Beijing ten years ago to study Chinese, my first encounter with Chinese/English signage was a plaque affixed to my dorm-room door which read "Don't spit or litter everwhere." I always wondered who was supposed to benefit from these instructions. Me, or my fastidiously ladylike Chinese roommate, who had been vetted extensively by the university to ascertain her suitability to live with a foreigner?

Anti-spitting campaigns are not just a phenonmenon of the last decade. They've often featured both in China's interactions with foreigners and as part of broader campaigns for social control domestically. In the nineteen tens and twenties, Chinese college students living in New York set up schools for working class Chinese immigrants to teach hygiene, good-grooming and proper manners to their deficiently refined countrymen. The impulse to educate came from mixture of nationalism and insecurity. The exchange students, who mostly came from affluent backgrounds, hated that in the eyes of many Americans they were indistinguishable from the poorer, less-educated residents of Chinatown. If they could reform their uncouth brethren, the students reasoned, they'd face less discrimination themselves. Sound familiar?

Many of the students were also in the thrall of ideas in vogue in the early 20th century throughout the world about the power of hygiene and manners to lift morals and modernize nations. The YMCA was a big promoter of this kind of thing in China between the two World Wars and Chiang Kai-shek made them into a quasi-fascistic state creed in his New Life Movement of the 1930s, imposing fines for spitting and laws mandating skirt lengths to help "strengthen" China so it could get rid of the Japanese.

Mao was infamously unfond of fancy manners, so injunctions against spitting fell out of fashion during his years at the helm. But they've been back in various campaigns against "hooliganism" and for "civilization" since the end of the Cultural Revolution. In the 198Os Deng Xiaoping introduced anti-spitting rules in Beijing sent hundreds of thousands of health workers though the city to enforce them. Ironically, according to an article I just found in our bureau archives (which contains a fat folder on hygiene campaigns), Deng held himself above the law in this regard and kept a large spitoon near his chair in the Great Hall of the People.

Despite their clear lack of efficacy anti-spitting campaigns are a perrenial phenomenon. There was one for the Olympic bid (during the period when Beijing was also painting its grass green) and one during SARS this time with a medical spin among many others.

What's amazing and I think disturbing is the grip this ideology still has on Chinese society and the extent to which it has survived for all of these year more or less intact. Even the social Darwinist language that suffused the edicts of the New Life movement in the 1930s still survives. "Much needs to be done to catch up with the civilization level of cities in major developed countries. We need to use all kind of means to regulate people's daily behavior and guide people to develop the habit of unconditionally abiding by regulations," urged a recent commentary in Shanghai's Wenhui Daily.

Compare that with an article extolling the virtues of sputum-retentions in the 1980s:
"Efforts to eliminate spitting will not only clear the capital's ground of phlegm, but purify people's minds and raise the nation's moral standards."

I suppose you could look at these campaigns as mere sillyness or naivete. They are on some level probably the work of aging bureaucrats and propagandists charged with helping get ready for the Olympics and falling back on the tried-and-true because that's all they know how to do. But I think there's something more genuinely damaging going on. More on this in Spit for Thought Part II.

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Reader Comments

Posted by skywalker
February 9, 2007

I think Susan Jakes is making the same mistake as the system she's criticizing: they're making anti-spitting campaigns bigger than it really is. Behaviors that cause little harm in rural life, such as spitting wherever you go, pose real and serious health problems in crowed urban living. You see repeated anti-spitting campaigns during last 100 years because that's when China is getting increasingly urbanized.

When I was growing up in Shanghai during 1970s and 1980s, no-spitting was widely accepted by Shanghainese. To be sure there was still spitting, particularly by the older folks, but at least the social pressure was not to. I got a culture shock when I entered Fudan and saw my classmates from coutry side, and particularly their parents, spit out of habit and without thought. Interestingly, every September is the only time Fudan is serious about enforing no-spitting rule. Susan, there is reason you saw your first sign against spitting in college dorm. Before the mass infusion of migrant workers, colleges and universities were the place where country meets city.

I wish the older ladies with arm band could be nicer to my classmates and their parents. I regret the fine (quite large for rural families) made a bad, almost hostile first impression on coutry folks. However, I think the underlying message is the right one: you're in city now, for the health of everyone, including yours, you need to adjust. Gradually, during class, you hear less noise of spitting and wiping with shoes on the concrete floor. In a room that is less than half of my daughter's bedroom, there were seven teenage boys living. How does it make you feel if someone spits on the wood floor in such a closed quarter?

Successive Chinese governments like to argue, since anti-spitting makes sense, so every kind of social control makes sense. Susan Jakes seems to argue since social control is bad, so anti-spitting must be bad too. how about not to throw out the baby with the bath water?

Let's not be ideologue about social control either. In US, there are government mandated vaccinations for obvious public health reason. It's the degree that matters. The practical solution is to be very light and gentle about social control and to only do the absolute minimum.

Posted by Mimi
February 9, 2007

Well said, Skywalker. What is that Chinese word this days..."ding"
DING

Posted by Lafan
February 9, 2007

There is a Part II? Please save me from such pettiness. Didn't Time Warner layoff some 300 people because of slowing interests in its news products? Why wast money on such silly insight?

Posted by zzyzx
February 9, 2007

Well put, Skywalker! I don’t want to repeat. Besides that, this is just another issue about socialist China’s image they have been trying to take care for decades, since almost everyone knows spitting is a bad habit. I know Shanghai is doing a better job in minimizing spitting in certain major streets and shopping areas through social control than most other cities in China. Hope they can keep all the good work and put an end of Shanghai’s spitting image someday. It seems possible. For the rest of China, I don’t have confidence in that for now.

Posted by AnNir
February 9, 2007

It does sound funny to say oh by "stop spitting" we can "raise the nation's moral standards". Shouldn't it be the other way around? Spitting is merely a manifestation of this big social problem of China; and to solve it, education is the key. Social cohesion and social order will follow once education level of the majority goes up. But we all know that this could take decades. So before that I guess the government is trying to make the people to believe that they are doing something bigger and better than just not spit.

Posted by ann larsen
February 10, 2007

Why do I find it scary that someone commenting on this type of article can sincerely start a sentence with "Social cohesion and social order will follow...." Anybody that assumes that enforced "cohesion and order" are worthy goals is a scary person. Not to say that spitting isn't disgusting and rude. I have an idea: don't go to China this year.

Posted by Richard Burnes
February 12, 2007

I like it when people spit on me and call me scum =)

Posted by marcelproust
February 12, 2007

1. What's so terrible about spitting into a spittoon?
2. Conversely, I still find it pretty confronting to go, say, into a lift [ok: elevator], and find someone has spat on the floor.
3. Culturally speaking, I think the habit which is difficult for westerners to accept is less the spitting and more the "hoick" or backward nose-blow (that is to say, nose suck and throat clear) which will then generally be followed by the spit. But then, to many Chinese, a nose-blow is pretty disgusting.
4. In Beijing recently, I haven't witnessed so much spitting, but I have witnessed plenty of "fingers only" nose-blows (after which the hand is shaken to let the fluid drop to the ground). Out of doors, at least, a spit would be preferable to that from a hygienic point of view.
5. Surely, it is true that in China "Much needs to be done to catch up with the civilization level of cities in major developed countries." Turn-taking, in particular, seems to be a big problem for many, in traffic, in queues or getting on and off the subway. Turn-taking is easy if there will be enough to go round for all, but it is harder in a country where there are so many people and scarcity is often real but always a recent cultural memory.
6. If it is a question of internalisation of rules (of course traditional rules or social norms are internalised: the difficulty is the modern rules which, as skywalker rightly observed, relate to modern urban life and, I might add, modern economic life), in China there are many rules, but they are unevenly enforced. Why should anyone internalise the rule? If the (new) rule is really important, the state will have someone standing there enforcing it, as for cyclists at major intersections.
7. In the meantime, I had to laugh this January when I read that the conductor of the Beijing Symphony Orchestra, Tan Lihua, was calling for laws to regulate the quality of New Year Gala concerts. I recently sat just behind him and Long Yu, conductor of the China Philharmonic Orchestra, in the second half of a concert by the China Philharmonic Orchestra (Mahler 1), and they talked throughout. There's no law against that anywhere that I know of, but it would be unthinkable anywhere else I can think of. To be fair to Tan Lihua, Long Yu was the conversational instigator.

Posted by Jan van Berthem
February 12, 2007

The spitting is tolerable, albeit disgusting behavior. What I find truly objectionable are parents that allow their children to urinate and defecate on the ground, including on the floors of buses, in restaurants, and in department stores.

Posted by Richard Burnes
February 12, 2007

i like to spit and spit on peoples faces...yea they deserve it if they talk to much crap...So take that!!! Pancakes are always good to eat when im bored and hungry late night... =)

Posted by Russell
January 13, 2008

The disgusting Chinese spitting problem is often attributed to a rural - urban thing. This is not simply a rural urban issue. I have lived in Thailand and Indonesia and Mexico all of which have rural populations the same or higher than China's. I have traveled very widely for my job. The only place that I have seen that has anything like the spitting problem of China - is India. Interestingly - a colleague was brought up in Japan (Yokohama) in the 1960s and he reports huge numbers of gobbers too!