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"Order, Please!"----ongoing Campaigns to Remould Beijingers

Day after day, at 6 a.m. when the morning rush hour is about to begin, Zhang Xiujuan shows up at the bus stop at the southwest corner of Yuquan Lu, where a dozen bus routes meet the No. 1 subway line that runs straight from Pingguoyuan far beyond the west section of the Fifth Ring Road through to Sihuidong in the city’s east. The traffic volume increases with each passing minute; more often than not several packed passenger buses attempt to file into the stop at a time. With red pennants in their hands, Zhang Xiujuan and her two workmates direct the buses to the right place while organizing the crowd to get on board one by one. “Order, please!” they keep shouting, trying to shoo commuters into the proper lines.

The three persons leave the stop for home at 9 a.m., and return for the afternoon rush hour from 4:30 to 7 p.m. They are among some 4,500 people working twice a day to ensure order at bus stops across Beijing, for governmental pay of 700 yuan (about US$90) a month. The work is part of a governmental programme to make Beijing a better place to live and to work in the run up to the 2008 Olympic Games. Most of the 4,500 are workers laid off from State-owned companies in the course of China’s industrial restructuring and quest for higher efficiency, and they need the job to augment their meagre living allowances. Two years ago, Zhang Xiujuan lost her job at the Shougang Steel Works, and, at 50, she has found it virtually impossible to get another job in her former field.

“Money is my top concern,” she said, adding that she wants to do her part to ensure the success of the 2008 Olympics because it will “bring honour to Beijing, my hometown.”

Across the length and breadth of Beijing, massive government-led campaigns are under way to softly encourage people to stand in lines properly, to stop spitting in public, and to discourage Jing ma, or “Beijing curses” for which Beijing’s football fans are nationally—probably internationally—notorious. In mid-January, the Beijing Municipal Government instituted the so-called “Learning to Line up Day” on the eleventh day of every month, which is to be observed until the Games begin on August 8, 2008. On February 11—the figure 11 seen as symbolizing people standing in an orderly queue—Liu Qi, the city’s Party chief and president of the Beijing Organizing Committee for the Games of the XXIX Olympiad, showed up at a bus stop, thanking the bemused commuters for their “civilized behaviour.” The story was highlighted in a US TIME Magazine series listing 100 “most influential” men and women around the world. This man, 64, “has been charged with the gargantuan task” of transforming China’s capital not only physically but also spiritually in time for the Games, the magazine opined.

While a milestone event to showcase China and Beijing to the world, the forthcoming Olympic Games are a source of various civic anxieties. As the International Herald Tribune puts it, despite the expectations and pride Beijing attaches to being the host of the 29th Olympic Games,the city has more “what ifs” than any other Olympic host city. “What if foreign visitors are forced to navigate a minefield of saliva left by local pedestrians spitting on sidewalks? What if lines at Olympic events dissolve into scrums as local residents jump to the head of the pack? What if Chinese fans serenade rival teams with the guttural, unprintable ‘Beijing curses’?"

In response to one of those “what ifs,” “laid-off workers” like Zhang Xiujuan have been hired to maintain order at bus stops, but there are millions of people willing to share with the government this “gargantuan” burden even without pay. Like Zhang Xiujuan, Liu Xiuzhen, a retired high school teacher, begins working at 6 a.m. each morning, not at a bus stop but in Tian’anmen Square, where she picks up litter and wipes up spit, evidence of the previous day’s “uncivilized visitors” in the “heart of China.” Liu, now in her 70s, decided to go to the square every day and help clean it when news came from Moscow on the evening of July 13, 2001, that Beijing had won its bid for the 2008 Olympics. “I can’t bear to see the square dirtied,” she said. “Yes, there are cleaners doing the job, but even after they have done the sweeping, there are still lots of cigarette butts in the lawns and flower beds.”

Liu Yuzhen is not alone in her fight against spitting and littering on a Tian’anmen Square that receives more than 40 million visitors from all over China every year. Wang Tao, a public servant in his 40s, has organized a team of 30 “woodpeckers” to do the same job. “Woodpeckers clean trees of worms,” he said. “We call ourselves woodpeckers because we are cleaning the square of whatever is hazardous to people’s health.”

But there is a difference between Wang and Liu. The woodpeckers are armed with cameras. While cleaning spit and litter, sometimes they take photos of people doing nasty things for publication on their Web site at http://blog.sina.com.cn/zhuomuniao. “That’s our last resort,” Wang said. “Normally, we persuade people caught spitting or littering to clean the dirty things themselves, but more often than not, the guys are not cooperative.” In one case, a woman was caught spitting and in response to request to wipe up the spit, she spat again on the ground.

Wang called spitting, littering and other bad habits “stubborn diseases that tarnish Beijing’s image.” To eradicate those “stubborn diseases,” the government has decided to impose a fine of 50 yuan, or US$6.50—hardly small charge in China—on people caught spitting or littering in public places. The policy is beginning to work. According to Wang and his fellow woodpeckers, there are fewer cases of spitting and littering in Tian’anmen Square and on shopping streets in Central Beijing such as Wangfujing and Xidan.

Taxi companies, for their part, are giving more fringe benefits to their employees to help the government get rid of smelly taxies. Some 60,000 taxies are registered for business in Beijing Municipality and in a recent citywide check-up; inspectors from the Municipal Taxi Administration Bureau verified that more than 1,000 taxies were smelly. Drivers of those taxies are all from suburban areas such as Miyun, Yanqing and Pinggu scores of kilometres away from Central Beijing. To save time and money, a vast majority of them eat and sleep in their cars most of the days. Resolution of the problem is now expected as companies are offering them beds in dormitories fitted with showers.

The Beijing Football Fans’ Association is taking the lead in battling “Beijing curses” by getting 600 fans organized into a “civilized cheering squad” to show fellow fans what they should do and what they should not do regardless how excited they get during a match. This augments the “Smiling Beijing” campaign, which involves some four million people offering services directly to fellow citizens, including government functionaries, members of the city’s police force, salesclerks, conductors and conductresses, and doctors and nurses. On February 11, the city’s subway system began practicing a set of new rules under which rude language is forbidden and polite language—such as “please” and “thank you”—is encouraged. Xing Guiyun, the person in charge of five subway stations in the heart of the city, including Wangfujing Subway Station, said it is difficult for her workers to fully abide by these rules. “Remember,” she said, “every day from about half past six to nine in the morning and from about five to seven in the afternoon we have 50,000 to 60,000 passengers to handle, all desperate to get into the trains for workplaces or homes.”

Unlike bus stops where order is maintained by people like Zhang Xiujuan, order during rush hours remains a problem at subway stations, where things often turn out to be a mess with crowds struggling to get in a train while those inside struggle to get out. “Fortunately, several new lines will be put into operation before 2008, and I believe things will have become better by then,” Xing Guiyun said.

At any rate, the number of people paid for maintaining order at bus stations will increase before the 2008 Olympics, according to the local press. For Zhang Xiujuan and her workmates, that means they can keep their 700 yuan-a-month job at least for another year. Wang Tao and Liu Yuzhen, however, think that the ongoing campaigns should continue even after the Games, given the stubbornness of the “diseases.”

Wang said, “These campaigns are, after all, meant to rebuild Beijingers.”