Why Do the Chinese Spit?
This week, Radar Magazine set out to solve the mystery of Chinese spitting.  Anyone who lives in China knows all too well the spit sounds are as much part of China's cities as say, the sound of waves crashing on a beach.  In one phase of what I like to call, Operation Foreigner Be Happy For Olympics, the Chinese government has sought to eradicate Chinese spitting.  But more interesting to me than how spitting in China will come to an end, is how it all began.  Here's an excerpt from Radar's Ethnicist:

Orville Schell, dean of UC-Berkeley's graduate school of journalism, and author of nine books on China, says Mao's Cultural Revolution is critical when considering China's surge in saliva.  "In general, manners declined during the revolution and in the post-revolution period," Schell told your Ethnicist. "There was an erosion of politesse, which was considered an upper-middle class affectation."  The dean suggests there are at least two reasons this behavior has persisted. "The first thing I'd have to say is that there is a traditional Chinese health notion that to void one's rheum is healthy.  That's the polite way of saying spitting," he adds, cheekily.  And the other reason? "This is a poor country with hundreds of millions of peasants for whom spitting is the same as breathing."

The theory that I have read about most is the thing about the "voiding of the rheum."  That voiding the rheum, or what normal people call "hawking loogies," is as normal to the Chinese as blowing one's nose in America.  And the thing is, if Chinese people would just learn how to say, "Pardon me while I void my rheum," I don't think foreigners would find it so revolting.  It might even be more polite than not spitting at all.

•Radar Magazine: The Ethnicist

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