Civilization Ho!

What does the number 11 mean to you? Probably not much… Maybe it is associated with some bad joke about what “one and one make,” or maybe it’s a lucky number. But otherwise 11 is just a number like any other.

In Beijing, 11 has a new meaning. It stands for being civilized. This concept itself is pretty interesting because in addition to recently coining the abbreviation “11,” it seems that the word for civilization has also recently been created. Chinese now use the word 文明 wenming to mean “civilized” the adjective. It used to be that wenming was a noun that meant civilization, as in “China: a civilization that has thousands of years of history.” It would seem that English has influenced the creation of a new meaning for this word.

What implications do the coinage of a new term and abbreviation have? Beijing is in the process of a major “civilization” campaign. There are posters everywhere that encourage people to be more 文明. In the subway, people are supposed to line up (the number 11 looks like two people lined up properly). People are not supposed to spit on the ground or walk around without their shirts on in public. In many ways, “civilization” means westernization, and the campaign to civilize is a campaign to be less Chinese. This trend strikes me as odd given that Chinese are proud to be part of a civilization that dates back thousands of years.

Beijingers are used to spitting on the street, pushing and shoving to get on trains and taking their shirts off when it’s hot. It’s the pesky foreigners coming in who are different, and there are certainly more Chinese doing things their way than foreigners disapproving. It does not seem fair to have a campaign against your own culture. Some might even recall the Cultural Revolution campaign against the 'Four Olds,' which attacked old customs among other "outdated" ways of life. Does anyone have the right to say that the Chinese way of life is less civilized than anyone else’s?

Some would say yes. It is certainly true that life is more pleasant when people don’t push and shove and spit on your feet. It may even be more pleasant if you could go into a restaurant in China and have an attentive server rather than having to yell across a crowded room to attract the attention of a waitress who is not ashamed to let you know how much she would rather be messaging on her mobile phone.

The people are not stupid either. They know that the government’s campaign for civilization is based on a Western ideal of Civilization. Therefore, Chinese people look at foreigners as examples of the civilized ideal. When I discovered this, I realized that a foreigner really cannot expect Chinese people to ever accept his behavior as anything like theirs.

On the hottest night of the summer I walked outside for the two minutes between Cody's apartment and mine with my shirt off. When I passed the “guards” who sit in front of the gate all night (with their shirts off or at least rolled up), I heard them talking about me. Their conversation was roughly as follows:

Guy 1: “Hah! Foreigners aren’t civilized either.”
Guy 2: “If they aren’t Civilized, why should we be?”
Guy 3: “Yeah, but he’s in really good shape…”

I don’t know if the third comment implied that you should be allowed to walk around with your shirt off only if you are in good shape, but I hope that’s what he was going for.

The main point, though, is that China is a civilization with thousands of years of history. People here have their own way of life, and they know that any effort to change their ways is based on external pressure. The implication for people like me is that we have to serve not only as an ambassador for our country, but also as an example of an ideal that Chinese people don’t necessarily want to adopt. There’s no way out because we seem so different that Chinese will never just overlook our behavior as normal.

August 11 is Civilization day. I for one can’t wait to see that China is exactly as civilized as it has been for thousands of years. I hope that people have enough pride to know that to really be civilized they need to do little more than avoid making other people angry. This is something China has known ever since Confucius wrote (around the 4th Century BC) that one should “do nothing to others that you don’t want done to yourself.”