It’s not a new revelation that China has a lot of rules.
Last year, there were rules for Beijing residents during the Olympics, and also rules for foreigners who came to town for the games (57 of them!)
This year, in Hubei province, a county government infamously ordered local officials to smoke locally produced cigarettes , while civil servants in the southwestern city of Kunming were ordered to learn 300 English sentences and 100 sentences in Lao, Burmese, Thai and Vietnamese, apparently to promote tourism in the region.
Today’s New York Times looks at some even more bizarre manifestations of rules run amok, such as an edict requiring schoolchildren to salute all passing vehicles on their way to and from school, and the Chongqing rule that “forced unmarried women to pass a chastity test before receiving compensation for farmland appropriated by the government.”
A potential side effect of so many seemingly arbitrary rules is that people may feel more inclined to skirt rules that they disagree with, or are simply too cumbersome to follow on a regular basis, fueling a culture of rule-bending and ignoring.
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