Today, as last week, my wife and I went on a long run downtown (or at least I ran and she biked along beside me). It's one of the more pleasant things we get to do together here, and it's a nice chance to talk. Now that my marathon was cancelled, I'm in a "maintenance mode" of doing as much running as I can during the week and doing about a ten mile long run on Saturday, and then participating in the Hash on Sunday.

Along the route, we run along a terrace on the side of Houhai and Qianhai lakes. Here's a picture looking back along Qianhai,

The fisherman are interesting, firstly, because of the incredibly long poles they use, and secondly because of all the "no fishing signs" posted along the lake. Last week after we got home, I turned on a TV show that showed the intrepid Beijing police cracking down on the fishermen in the very spot that we'd passed by (I don't know when the crackdown occurred). It was a typical police reality show here, complete with a grainy camera hidden in a handbag so as not to tip off the suspects, police politely helping the offenders to take their poles apart, and a man saying that he had no idea that you weren't supposed to fish there followed by a pan to the "no fishing sign." I have some sympathy for the man, because there are always people fishing there, and in just about all the lakes and moats we pass by. There seemed to be just as many people fishing there this week, so the crackdown didn't seem to have any lasting effect that I could see. Fishing with a 20-foot long pole is not exactly a covert activity, so it strikes me as a good example of the way people seem to view laws here.

I keep hearing references to an increase in the fine on spitting to 50 yuan (about $6) from whatever it might have been before. I would have to say that if I had 50 yuan for everytime I've seen or heard someone hawk and spit, or had to maneuver around the consequences of that activity, it would more than pay for our trip and living expenses. I can't imagine that there's any real effort to enforce that in Beijing (and a cab driver told me that the police aren't pulling cabs over for traffic offenses because they don't want to get SARS), because it's such an embedded part of life here, albeit one I find really disgusting. I know that English gentlemen with their snuff jars were doing something along the same lines (although diseases were endemic there at that time), but it sure seems like a great way to spread disease. There has certainly been some change over time. This trip I only noticed one person spitting inside a store, and he was an old man who then rubbed it into the ground with his foot.

In many ways it's a deep strength and a saving grace of this society that it's *so* anarchistic, but it means that enforcing any kind of social or sanitation change is a difficult and complicated matter. In the case of spitting, I see no signs that it is being enforced, but should that ever happen, it's going to be as hard to get rid of as fishing in Qianhai.

Or, as Laozi would put it (courtesy of Stan Rosenthal's translation, Chapter 57 --http://www.clas.ufl.edu/users/gthursby/taoism/ttcstan3.htm#57 )

The greater the number of laws and restrictions,
the poorer the people who inhabit the land.
The sharper the weapons of battle and war,
the greater the troubles besetting the land.
The greater the cunning with which people are ruled,
the stranger the things which occur in the land.
The harder the rules and regulations,
the greater the number of those who will steal.