Every few weeks we see an article on public manners in China. I’ve written about it recently myself. It’s the LA Times’ turn today. In the run up to 2008, there appears to be no shortage of public campaigns in Beijing against ‘rude behavior’ and ‘backwards habits’ about which to write. But what the articles in the foreign media don’t address is how this notion of ‘backwardness’ is defined. Here the recent campaigns in Beijing fall into a pattern that dates back over a century.
In his book, Awakening China, John Fitzgerald argues that Chinese intellectuals of the late 19th and early 20th century internalized Western critiques of Chinese society and so Western rules of etiquette, civilized behavior if you will, became conflated with larger debates about what it meant to be “modern.” Foreign criticism, much of it from missionaries stationed in China, included things like spitting, loud eating, loud talking, footbinding, concubinage, and public hygiene. Many of these same concerns, often expressed in startlingly similar language, would appear in New Culture era writings by Chinese intellectuals who cited these behaviors as evidence of China’s “backwardness” and the need to modernize.
In the 1930s, part of Chiang Kai-shek’s New Life