Hurray! The Chinese can stand politely in line
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It's a shame that lining up in good order and waiting for one's turn has hit the headlines again and again in Chinese reports about the World Expo.
On Saturday, more than one million visitors crowded into the World Expo site and many Chinese media outlets lost no time in telling the world that those visitors - mostly Chinese - had lined up nicely.
These kinds of news reports, repeated time and again over the past few months, strike me that the World Expo, with a slogan of "Better City, Better Life," has been given a sacred mission to nudge Chinese people to line up in good order. And to many naive Chinese journalists, an isolated case of orderly lines at the World Expo would mean most Chinese have really learned to behave well in public.
Chinese are notorious for cutting the lines and spitting in public. Queuing up well at the World Expo does not mean those same visitors will behave as well outside the Expo site. The World Expo is a special venue, where a mixture of national pride and physical limitations (you can't cut ahead of someone if you cannot move at all in a crowd of one million people) force people to line up in good order.
Once the on-your-best-behavior pressure lets up - once they leave the World Expo and rush into a shopping mall - they might well jump the queue. Old habits die hard and orderly lines are still hard to find.
Back at our canteen, I am forever elbowed by Shanghainese men and women - typically those in their 40s and 50s - who would steal a step ahead of me in ordering food.
Many of them have been to the World Expo - judging from their loud talk about their shallow understanding of the event - and yet they remain die-hard line cutters.
Good public manners such as lining up in good order begin with family and school education. We cannot pin our hopes on an isolated event such as the World Expo to make people behave better, while family and school education fails.
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