Commercial Graffiti

When we came to work yesterday there was freshly painted graffiti on our front wall.  But this was not vandalism by delinquent kids, it was an ad for forklift services; just two characters and a mobile phone number.  Our whole park is in the midst of an upgrade, so to have our factory defaced in this way was more galling.  When I first came to China I was struck by the ubiquity of this ugly phenomenon.  It is not just on factories, it is on most visible walls, in elevators, in stairwells AND on my front door.  There are more than two dozen roughly pasted stickers and stencilled details on and around the door for various services.  It is the same for everyone.  My instinct is to call them and ask them to come over on the pretext of getting my toilet fixed (or whatever it is that they claim to be able to do, but can't) then to stand over them while they clean it up.  Of course this is would achieve nothing and that is why Chinese people do nothing about it.  But the big question is why the authorities let it happen.  It really is just a matter of calling up the number and then fining the person who turns up.

 The only thing that I can think of is that the police do not care.  It is easy to say that they have more important things to do, but the fact is that they do not do a good job of anything.  The blatant and dangerous flouting of the traffic laws goes totally unpunished.  In fact, it is not noticed.  Even where there is a policeman on point duty making a totally amateurish and desultory effort at directing traffic, drivers do what they please and nobody cares.  It seems to me that in the end no one is held responsible for anything. "When you gotta job to do you gotta to do it well", doesn't seem to apply here.

I do not fully understand what is going on, except that perhaps when things are so chaotic and on such a vast scale, no effort by any one individual to change anything can have any effect.  There is a sense of resignation to the inertia.  It is like the tired junk yard owner who manages to make a living in spite of the chaos, but never musters the energy or the money to get his operation organised.  There is simply so much to do and no obvious place to start.  In the case of China, the leadership does launch campaigns now and then to improve this or that, as in the case of the public education campaigns before the Olympics and then Expo in Shanghai two years later.  In those two cases there was some improvement, but normally there is not. I think in that case it comes down to the fact that there was a clear aim that was accepted by the public as legitimate. On other occasions it is not seen that way.  Even genuine attempts by officials to improve things will be seen as just another campaign driven by someone's desire to make their mark and get a promotion.

So in addition to the overwhelming sense of inertia that confronts anyone contemplating reform, there is the cancer of illegitimacy i.e. the public does not have respect for authority.  I have indeed seen drivers get out of their cars and challenge the duty policemen to the extent of engaging in fisticuffs.  In any other country that I have experience of, this would lead to arrest, but not necessarily in China.  The policemen knows that this guy may have powerful friends and if arrested will simply get himself off the hook and, to boot, make sure the the arresting policeman's life is made difficult.

There may be progress, but it is very slow and very tentative.  A few days ago I can home and found that the housing estate managers had sent someone around with a bucket of whitewash and a mop.  They had clumsily covered up the phone numbers on the wall next to the door.  They were only half covered and you could still read the numbers.  The idiot sent to do the job had slopped the paint all over the landing and the stairs, so that the clumsy cover up job was worse than the original problem.  That is another common story here.