A Nation Incapable of Greeting Strangers

When one crosses a country as large as China by rail, there are many opportunities to interact with locals.  Three days and a couple of thousands of miles bring together many complete strangers in the public space that is the railway system.  In the interactions is commonly and conspicuously missing among the hundreds of railway staff, bunk mates on sleeper carriages, and all the people working and making their living around railway stations.  That is the complete absence of greetings exchanged.

Here the word "greetings" can be quite inclusive.  People do not say "hello," "thank you," "goodbye," "excuse me," or "please" even when services are clearly exchanged for money.  Nor are there any signs of the body language equivalent.  Whether smiles, nods, waves, or handshakes.  Instead, people just look at each other blankly, state what they need, quietly and stoically completely what are needed, and move on without a peep.  No inquiries about how things are going, no attempt at small talk of any kind.

The lack of greetings is clearly becoming a social norm widely observed in public spaces.  Whenever the author says "hello" or "thank you" to others on the road, he is often met with a combination of confusion and surprise as people frantically search for appropriate responses they rarely ever need to enunciate.  More often than not, the author simply receives a puzzling look for the receiving person, who is most likely trying to evaluate if the author is mentally alright.

Such phenomenon is not new in China, and the author has observed it in his many short trips to the country in the past few years.  Yet, to call the phenomenon "cultural" in nature is to ignore the history of a classical China as land of rituals, where greetings were not only normal nut nearly mandatory as displays of proper social relationships in traditional Confucian hierarchies.  How contemporary China became a place without greetings is worth examining from a multitude of other perspectives.

One is economic.  In a state-owned monopoly that is the Chinese railway system, there simply are not too many incentives for railway staff to be nice to passengers.  Despite rise of low-cost airlines, the railway system remains the predominant method of long-distance travel for the common people.  Bad customer service does not take away the demand and passenger numbers of trains.  And because staff holds lifelong positions that cannot be lose unless obvious criminal activities are found, they certainly do not see improving customer service as something they need to do for their respective jobs.

Not that people understand what is "good" customer service to begin with.  Decades of Central planning, followed by export-led manufacturing economy, meant that the very concept of "good customer service" is pretty much lost to the entire economically productive populace.  To teach customer service in China today requires borrowing first from service industries in other countries, and tailor those for Chinese cultural contexts.  The process of that tailoring is bound to take decades at least.

But what about the common people?  What are their excuses for not greeting strangers when greetings themselves do not cost a dime and can make public spaces so much more amicable for everyone?  The rationale may lie in the sad reality that in modern-day China, the only people who happily go around greeting complete strangers in public places are scammers, con artists, and unscrupulous salesmen.  For obvious reasons, these people are elements of society that the general populace do not trust and seek to avoid. 

The resulting "low-trust society" makes it difficult for ordinary people to casually greet one another without suspecting dark ulterior motives.  And such suspicions are quite contagious.  Even the author, while in China, tends to ignore people who come over to say hi for no apparent reason.  The perceived risk of endangering oneself by interacting with the "new friend" is just too great.  Multiply the risk aversion by billions of people and friendliness in public spaces can easily erode down to non-existent.

Many argues that the problem noted above will naturally go away as China becomes wealthier.  A cosmopolitan elite will rise, taking best practices from abroad and implement them in China.  The author, however, is pessimistic on the matter.  For one thing, per personal observations, lack of greetings in public has only become more widespread over the past few years even as the economy grew rapidly, accompanied by creation of a globally well-heeled elite conscious of China's social deficiencies. 

The pessimism stems from the fact that socially conscious elite will likely remain a demographically tiny minority increasingly distant from the masses that they hope to bring more progressive social norms.  Any aggressive moves by the elite to change social behaviors will only be perceived as condescending and resisted as not fitting with social conditions on the ground.  Any lasting changes will have to be bottom-up, but it remains a mystery where and how such bottom-up initiatives may come.