Foreigners notice " and raise their eyebrows at " the way babies are dressed right away when they come to China. Chinese babies wear special pants with no seam in the middle, and they don’t wear diapers. So, in effect, Chinese babies run around all day with their bums hanging out " it’s actually rather cute before you realize what it means in terms of bodily function. From the very beginning Chinese babies are taught to squat someplace convenient when they need to go. Since their pants pull apart when they squat, they can go without making a mess of themselves or their pants. Or so the theory goes anyway. I must admit that I don’t particularly understand the hygiene-logistics involved.

While an article in China Daily from three years ago derides the split pants and claims that they’re quickly going out of style amongst the modern middle class (1), such claims hold little water when one is actually in Beijing. Personally, I can count on one hand the number of times I’ve seen a Chinese baby wearing a diaper in Beijing, and my time here includes the coldest of the winter months.

This attitude that the bathroom is wherever you need to go might be less offensive to Westerners were it limited to babies. But it isn’t. Of all the many varied and interesting cultural differences between the west and China, the way Chinese use the bathroom in public is particularly anathema to westerners. In the west it’s not wholly unusual to see an inebriated man writing his name in urine on the wall down the street from a popular bar in the middle of the night. But such behavior is frowned upon and in fact it qualifies as public lewdness and is illegal in many western countries, whether those laws are actively enforced or not. Public urination and defecation, far from being illegal in China, is actually almost common.

One day I was walking down the streets of Datong (a modern industrial city in northern China) at about 10:30 in the morning and a girl of about 10 years old walked out of a shop and onto the sidewalk, pulled down her pants, popped a squat, and went to the bathroom right there. I hardly knew how to react. No one else on the street seemed to even notice, so I just averted my eyes and kept walking. In my time here in China I’ve come to realize that that incident in Datong was unusual only in that it was a girl doing it; women don’t tend to use the bathroom in public. Men are not shy about doing so, but for some reason it’s much less common for women.

There are public restrooms in Beijing of course, but it’s easy to understand why people don’t much want to use them. Generally speaking, such places are a series of holes in the ground over which one squats and the stench tends to be unbearable. I fully understand and sympathize with any reluctance the Chinese might harbor to use a public restroom in Beijing. The problem arises in our differing solutions to that problem: whereas I hold it for a usable restroom somewhere else (say at a restaurant), the Chinese often appear to feel no need to.

Even if the large part of Beijing residents don’t seem to see any particular issues with the current state of affairs, the Central Government has a different opinion. The Central Government is concerned with one thing above all lately in Beijing: that China look good in the eyes of the world for and during the 2008 Olympics. One of their biggest concerns is that Beijingers' manners are just not up to snuff (see article on Spitting). But oddly, while the campaign seems very concerned about behaviors, such as spitting, line jumping, and not picking up pet waste, (2), public urination and defecation don’t seem to rate very highly on the list of things that need to change (3). And what’s more, the general public doesn’t seem to be paying much attention to the government’s campaign; many people are skeptical that the campaign will be able to make any difference at all (4).

1)   http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/english/doc/2004-07/16/content_349150.htm
2)   http://service.china.org.cn/link/wcm/Show_Text?info_id=183079&p_qry=spitting
3)   http://www.abc.net.au/correspondents/content/2006/s1589405.htm
4)   http://www.coxwashington.com/reporters/content/reporters/stories/2006/04/30/BC_CHINA_MANNERS30_COX.html

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