Slow down and we'll all get there faster
- Source: Global Times
- [21:47 March 18 2010]
- Comments
Illustration: Liu Rui
By Rong Xiaoqing
On the day 9/11 shook the world, I was watching TV from my apartment in Queens, New York as seven miles away panicked people covered in dust ran from the collapsing buildings and raced for buses that could get them out of the area.
And as they did that they did, to the average Chinese, a very strange thing: They queued. Despite the horror, despite the chaos, despite the fear, they didn't scramble to push onto the buses. Instead, they QUEUED.
The same footage has been watched by millions of people in China. As a first-year international student, I joined my Chinese friends in an Internet chat room to remark enviously about the level of education, sophistication and civility of American people.
The incredibly orderly scene beside those shuttle buses in downtown Manhattan on that horrific day contrasted sharply with the ubiquitous battle zone in front of buses in China. Most Chinese people seem to consider getting on the bus to be a life-or-death issue every day of the year.
When I recently went back to China for a visit for the first time in seven years, my memory of the squeezing, pushing, shoving and elbowing was immediately refreshed.
The economic boom has made some difference. There is less yelling, arguing and fighting. But the desire to get ahead of everyone else and the fear of lagging behind are still as strong.
I felt this in the train station in Beijing, where people kept pressing forward even before the gate was open. In the public bathrooms in many cities I visited, people were more likely to wait for the toilet right in front of the booths that have no doors rather than forming a line in an adjacent area.
The mechanics are clear: Seeking to inch ahead and getting closer or passing those in front of you apparently is a no brainer for many people. And for some, it seems the longtime practice has embedded a belief in their mind that to push is the only way to move forward.
As a taxi driver told me after he conducted a James Bond style stunt on a busy road in Beijing that brought us ahead of two other cars and left me covered in cold sweat: "If I didn't do that, we'd be stuck here forever."
But more often, it makes everyone stuck. On a lake in a park in Shijiazhuang, Hebei Province, my boat was stuck with a couple of dozen others. We all had to go under a narrow bridge to get our boats back to the wharf on time.
If we had lined up, it would have taken at most 10 minutes for all of us to get through. Unfortunately every boat tried to be the first and we ended up sending each other spinning away from the bridge in a small pleasure boat pile-up.
The same energy that pushes Chinese forward in queues also works as an engine for them to work hard to accumulate personal wealth.
This drive may have played an important role in China's rapid development. When everyone is trying to get rich, the whole country can accelerate.
But without regulation, the market economy can soon go off the rails. The slew of food safety issues in China in recent years is an unfortunate example.
But a rising tide lifts all boats, and as a society develops sometimes the only way to get that boat higher is by people working together rather than pushing and shoving.
The Western world understands this better. It wasn't so much the high level of education and civilization of American people that helped them queue for those buses on 9/11 but their training in efficient systems at work and in their communities.
It's not that the Chinese don't understand it. I remembered a scene in a movie from my childhood in which 10 kids were divided into two groups. Each of them was asked to hold a string that attached to a ball in a narrow necked bottle and the teams were told whoever could get all the balls out of the bottle would be the winner.
When it started, the kids in one group tried to pull their own balls out at the same time and they all got stuck, while the kids in the other group did it one by one and won the game.
The leader of the winning team, a 10-year-old boy, told the judge that he learned the method from his father, a mine worker who organized coworkers to get out of a narrow tunnel one by one during an accident, so that many workers who would have been otherwise killed in the chaos escaped.
Smart idea! But we don't always have to wait for the life-and-death moment to exercise it.
The author is a New York-based journalist. rong_xiaoqing@hotmail.com
