A norm: why don't they queue?

[Guest Yau]

I'm really tired of queue-jumping in china. In a ticket box, public transport, airport and buying food, it happens everywhere. One exception: I saw a group of chinese travlers in the bangkok airport last year, and about 10 of them queued for spitting at the rubbish bin. The picture was unforgettable...and unprecedented. But when we were okay to get on board, it was just an embarassing mess, they all swarm into the boarding counter, like fishes chasing for their feeds. Even worse, the native thai airline flight lady spoke chinese suddenly but the word is 'Pai Dui! Pai Dui' (queue!)

Really curious about the rationale behind that. When they will or will not queue? How do the local people feel about it ? Annoyed or accepted?

I complainted every time i faced this problem, and 99% jumpers slided away. The rest may neglect me and then i kept insisting that he has to queue, and they really did it too. Were I too strange to ask people queue in china?

[Quest]

they've gone through the CulRev.... what does "order" mean to them?

Seriously, I think education + money + time will change the phenomenon.

Right now, we have 1.3billion poor people trying to get on that one bus....

they have no social status anyways, they wouldn't care how you look at them.

[holyman]

some of them do queue up but most i saw dont, cos there is no value insisting the queue when the rest wont do it. and they do get things faster if they dont queue up. it's not like there'll be any penalty for not queuing up. in other places the ticket seller or vendors might say 'please queue up' or they'll not serve u. they serve those who queue up, so in the end everybody does queue up. here the people in charge couldnt really care.

[skylee]

I complainted every time i faced this problem, and 99% jumpers slided away. The rest may neglect me and then i kept insisting that he has to queue, and they really did it too. Were I too strange to ask people queue in china?

No, not strange. I do the same. And most of the time the complaining works. But sometimes it is useless when 50 or 60 people try to get on a bus at the same time.

[holyman]

No, not strange. I do the same. And most of the time the complaining works. But sometimes it is useless when 50 or 60 people try to get on a bus at the same time.

10yrs ago when i first came to beijing, every weekend at fuxingmen i saw people trying to get up no.320 bus, not only they crowded at the door rushing to get up, they push and even punch older people who cant get up fast enuff on their backs. it was a shock to me.

[TSkillet]

I agree it's really annoying, but my suspiscion is that it comes from not having enough bus seats, train seats, Quarter Pounders, bags of rice, whatever to go around for 1.2 million people. I'm sure someone else will mention Confucianism and the concern for the family unit taking a much much larger role over concerns for strangers.

I've heard it called the Chinese Courtyard Syndrome - where families make sure their courtyard is clean, even if it means sweeping all the trash just outside your door - it doesn't matter that the street is dirty, because your courtyard is clean.

[bhchao]

On China Airlines, which I last rode 19 years ago and in my opinion has the worst safety record, I remembered passengers immediately getting out of their seats once the plane touched the ground, like they could not wait to get out. The flight attendants had to say "Sit down, sit down" in Mandarin.

[pazu]

Do you notice that most Chinese queue jumpers struggle to be the first in the queue in a very subtle way? They try to jump the queue without struggling, without forcing others away. That's 禮義之邦! haha.

And there're two situations only during my time in China, if people queue, I queue. If people jump queue, I STRUGGLE to be the first in the queue, and it works faster than the K train.

I had a friend (overseas Chinese) once suggested me to tell others and teach others (education?) to queue, and he thought people would listen to me if I said this politely. I suggested him to come to China and do it by himself.

[Guest Yau]

I had a friend (overseas Chinese) once suggested me to tell others and teach others (education?) to queue, and he thought people would listen to me if I said this politely. I suggested him to come to China and do it by himself.

While expressing openly about the misbehavior may drive to a clash in hongkong, it often --if not always -- works in china.

I was reading a book in the Book City in Shenzhen last month. A arrogant mother took her son to the shelf that has loads of history books for intermediate to advanced readers. She yelled again and again, and said her son should love these books. Everybody looked at her but she felt good to enjoy herself yelling for more than 5 mins. I couldn't stand her harsh disturbance anymore and asked her : "Chao gou le meiyou ? " The air was dead and she gazed at me angrily, but she slided away immediately.

The most annoying event, however, happened on a train. There was a young man sat next to me, carried a leather bag and elegant business suit. And he chewed a slight piece of meat remained in his tooth and finally spitted it at my side. I tried my best to show how disgusting i felt and said "You mei you gao cuo!!" He apologised and everything was fine.

It's okay that you can express openly about anything you hate, my experience suggests that if you don't do it , you will be a victim. When a receptionist was having phone with her friend in gossip, completing ignoring the queue waiting for her help, she just won't feel embarassed about it and you must reprimand her of being improfessional, and totally losing her committment to "serve people".

Complaint, complaint and complaint isn't ideal but what else i should do to avoid being treated as a stupid.

[holyman]

one usual tactic in mainland is, u bring the annoying peoson into spotlight, they'll back off. but it does backfire sometimes... usually with 泼妇...

[sunyata]

The most annoying event' date=' however, happened on a train. There was a young man sat next to me, carried a leather bag and elegant business suit. And he chewed a slight piece of meat remained in his tooth and finally spitted it at my side. I tried my best to show how disgusting i felt and said "You mei you gao cuo!!" He apologised and everything was fine.

[/quote']hahaha, that's the funniest story ever!

[wushijiao]

In Russia, a country with a histroy of food shortages and the like, they wait in lines just like in English speaking countries. So I don't know if you can blame it on a history of having shortages and famine. I blame it more on a lack of civil mind in Chinese culture.

The worst for me is getting off subways. The guards try to control the "Xian xia, hou shang" order as well as possible. But if I'm getting off, and a young guy tries to get on by not letting me get off, well, I (1.9m, 90kg) give him a good hit backwards, American football-style.

[pazu]

I always wanted to go back to the beginning of last century to see how Chinese behaved...

Mr. Yau's post reminded me of some of my other experience in China.

When I was in Wuxi 無錫 I wanted to buy a bus ticket at the 文明窗口 (Civilized ticket booth), and the "supposed-to-be-civilized" lady gave me a cold look and uttered the notorious response, "沒有!" I asked her what it meant by "meiyou", meiyou ticket, or I went to the wrong bus ticket. She said, "沒有就沒有!"

I wasn't really annoyed, but wanted to make some fun of her. I pointed to the word 文明 and asked her, "what's this??? what's thisss???!" She was quite surprised and said, "... 甚麼? 你想買甚麼?"

I told her that she didn't deserve to have the word "civilized" sticked on her booth, she was shocked, ashamed, and said very politely, "You can go to the opposite booth..."

And it was even funnier when I was in Beijing. I was there just a week after Beijing won the bidding for the Olympics 2008, so it was very convenient for me to say, "你這樣的服務態度, 將來怎樣辦奧運!" And I said this long before Andy Lau's TV ads...

[holyman]

I told her that she didn't deserve to have the word "civilized" sticked on her booth, she was shocked, ashamed, and said very politely, "You can go to the opposite booth..."

wah, usually people take most about what they lack... so when they say 'wenming' or 'limao' or 'suzhi', it usually means they are lacking it... same thing for 'traffic rules', 'keep clean' and 'dont spit in public'...

[ala]

This somewhat proves Yuwen textbooks are worthless. Or maybe the bulk of population never saw those Yuwen textbooks?

[pazu]

Okay, back to the point. But why didn't they queue? It must worth a PhD degree if you can fully understand this phenomenon.

[galitonwu]

[hparade]

those experiences are funny...and yet disgusting...

i think what maybe in their mindset is not to "執輸", to quote a cantonese word

[Guest Yau]

i think what maybe in their mindset is not to "執輸", to quote

a cantonese word

Haha. The cantonese wisdom may suggest that we should not jump queue

too.

執輸行頭慘過敗家 (being the last and being the first is worse than losing all family fortune) .

[bathrobe]

I have just got back from a conversation with a lady who sold me bookshelves at a furniture mart in Beijing.

She told me she loves China but hates the way that people don't queue. So a lot of Chinese find it objectionable, too, when people don't queue. I think that most people would be happy to queue, and do, but there is a minority (probably not more than 10%) who abuse the civilised behaviour of other people.

I've stood in queues to buy railway tickets in China, and the queue hardly moves because a minority is constantly pushing in at the front. In the meantime, the decent people who have queued up just lose out.

A failure to queue is actually incredibly inefficient. When I went to Shilin (Yunnan) several years back, the people pushed, shoved, and crowded in to buy tickets at the entrance. They were so aggressive that the people who had already bought tickets could hardly get out! Since there were probably no more than 20-30 people, if everyone had queued they could have bought their ticket in an orderly fashion and got into Shilin much quicker. Instead, it was a free-for-all that slowed the ticket selling to a crawl.

The big contrast for me was when I got to the Vietnamese border at Hekou. I was absolutely stunned to see a long queue of petite Vietnamese women, lined up very tightly behind each other in an orderly fashion, talking and laughing and looking quite happy.

The Vietnamese are supposed to be much poorer than the Chinese. If scarcity is the main reason for the atrocious queuing behaviour of the Chinese, why aren't the Vietnamese even worse?