China told to mind its manners

Mrs Mischke is campaigning to ensure her fellow citizens don't disgrace 5000 years of history with ill-timed belching, farting and spitting.China told to mind its manners
By Mary-Ann Toy, Beijing, The Age Melbourne

FOR Lu-Chin Mischke, an elegant Chinese woman who lived abroad for many years, life back in China is sometimes one long assault on her sensibilities.

A stroll in one of Beijing's lovely parks or temple complexes is a respite from the city's smog and traffic—until the first ear-splitting hawking up of phlegm lands too close for comfort. Then there's the mindless littering, the mobile phones ringing—and being answered—in cinemas, the flagrant disregard for traffic rules and the failure to queue.

Beijingers have a deserved reputation for being friendly and straightforward, but with the world descending here in 2008 for the Olympics, city leaders and fed-up citizens such as Mrs Mischke are campaigning to ensure their fellow citizens don't disgrace 5000 years of history with ill-timed belching, farting and spitting.

Mrs Mischke, who lived in the US and Japan for more than a decade, set up the not-for-profit Pride Institute last year to improve manners because she was tired of being embarrassed by Chinese lack of etiquette. "I want my kids to grow up and be proud of being Chinese," she says.

Since then she has personally, tactfully, told off more than a hundred offenders and held more than a dozen free seminars for the city's less-well-off to explain why spitting, using mobile phones indiscriminately, bad breath, body odour and treating the motherland as a garbage bin are unacceptable.

Mrs Mischke's seminars are free, helped by a growing number of enthusiastic volunteers. Her motivation is patriotism and the message is self-respect and self-discipline for a better society. She teaches people to make eye contact, smile and be considerate and friendly.

"I do not want people to associate Chinese people as being uncivilised," she says. "We Chinese are very proud of our long history, but where does it say that spitting or bad breath is part of our culture?" Beijing's municipal government is also intensifying its efforts to improve behaviour through newspaper columns, cartoons and television commercials. The city has hired more than 3000 public transport attendants who will patrol bus stops and the subway to encourage queuing rather than the free-for-all that greets every overcrowded bus or train.

Almost 3 million etiquette handbooks are to be sent to households telling residents to stop belching, slurping or farting, especially while eating in public, or at least, to apologise if they do. And, to Mrs Mischke's horror, millions of "spit bags", left over after the severe acute respiratory syndrome epidemic, are being distributed with instructions on "civilised spitting".