A few weeks ago, I wrote about a number of public service advertisements that I had been seeing in and around Jinan's Hui Quarter. As a reminder, here's what they looked like:
In English, it declares: "Hygiene and Civilization Go Hand in Hand"
"The City of Springs (Jinan) is My Home. Creating Cleanliness Depends on Everyone."
"It's up to us to create a beautiful life. Realizing the goal of cleanliness depends upon everyone."
"Build a nationally-regarded hygienic city. Improve all aspects of the city's development environment."
These are all posters I've seen near the Hui Quarter. But they are by no means limited to this area of the city. Rather, they appear nearly everywhere throughout Jinan. Some examples:
Near the Parc66 Mall: "Create a Civilized City. Build a Beautiful Home."
And another: "Civilized Behavior Creates the Image of the Spring City's Inner Beauty."
And in Quancheng Square: "Love Our Beautiful Spring City, Build a Civilized Jinan."
In an alley adjacent FuRong Street in the city's Old Town, we see another iteration of a sign seen earlier: "It's up to us to create a beautiful life. Realizing the goal of cleanliness depends upon everyone."
And lastly, in the middle of the pedestrian walkway at Furong Street, in the very heart of the tourist areas of the Old Town: "Create a more beautiful enivronment. Build orderliness of the first class. Create a nationally-regarded hygienic city."
These kinds of ads are all over the city, but they also appear on TV. For instance, on last night's local news on Jinan's local TV Network (literally, the "Jinan News" Channel, 济南新闻), the evening broadcast included a nearly twenty minute expose segment called "舌尖《保卫战》" or "On the Tip of the Tongue: The War to Protect Cleanliness." The segment was a graphic look at the food standards industry that followed local law enforcement as they raided horribly unsanitary producers of foodstuffs. Amid scenes of cops pulling vast quantities of rice noodles (米粉) intended for bulk sale to unsuspecting restaurants out of scum covered tanks where they had been soaking, and confiscating crates of sea cucumber that had been transported in terribly dingy storage, the program cut to shots of smartly uniformed officers explaining exactly why these food purveyors would use such sketchy tactics to alter flavors or increase shelf life of products, or cover shortcomings in quality. At the end of the segment, the anchors in the studio pivoted, asking "这样的食品谁敢吃?" Who would dare eat such things? This rhetorical question was followed immeidately by man on the street interviews of citizens expressing unease at eating from local street vendors and restauranteurs due to quality control issues. The message was clear: food safety must be a priority.
It's evident from these public service posters that Jinan is attempting to fashion itself into a 文明 (wenming, civilized) and 卫生 (weisheng, hygienic) city. Less evident, however, is what exactly this means? It's a question that I've taken to asking many of my interviewees here: What exactly does making Jinan a 卫生, 文明 city mean to you? For the most part, my respondents understand the terms as connected: A civilized and hygienic city is one where people don't throw trash on the ground. It's a place where people don't spit in public. It's a place where vendors don't cook with dirty materials, or in apallingly unclean kitchens. It's a place where people line up for getting on to the bus. Where nobody shoves or pushes or cuts in line. Where nobody ignores traffic lights. The 卫生, 文明 city is clean, orderly, and polite. However, this vision of the civilized, clean, polite city may also have implications beyond individual behavior. Making Jinan a city like this may imply significant changes to the city grid itself. Cleaning up Jinan may necessarily involve changes to buildings or neighborhoods that are dilapidated or run down. It may involve repaving or widening streets that are pocked with potholes or that are too narrow to accomodate proper sanitation. This, too, is a part of making sure a city reaches the goal of becoming 卫生.
Which poses some interesting questions for the Hui Quarter in Jinan. Compared with surrounding areas, like the tidy alleyways of nearby Old Jinan, or the glittering shopping plazas at Parc66 or Shimao Plaza just up the street, the Hui Quarter looks a little less glamorous. The buildngs in the neighborhood are mostly 20 to 30 year old walk-up style apartment buildings that have not aged particularly well. The streets are in need of repaving. The alleyways are narrow, and filled with open air vendors selling meat, vegetables, food and baked goods. The broader streets are lined with dozens of places that sell yangrou chuan'r. At night, the neighborhood is bathed in neon light, and smoke from the grill fires and inundated with the sound of people enjoying beer and barbecue. As a result the neighborhood is a panoply of sights, smells, and sounds, both pleasant and otherwise.
I often follow up my questions about defining the terms by asking respondents if they believe that Jinan's Hui Quarter is a place that can be described in these terms. Is it 卫生? Is it 文明? The answer: unequivocally, no. One 20-something I met recently while sharing a dinner table in a tiny, hole in the wall shop in the Hui Quarter that sells halal guotie (锅贴, pan-fried dumplings) explained it this way: "This neighborhood isn't such a great place. It's got really good food, but otherwise, it's atmosphere is pretty bad." He continued to say that while the neighborhood was a great place to come to eat barbecue, it wasn't very clean or prosperous. Others echo these sentiments. One woman, a middle aged English teacher expressed a strong dislike of the neighborhood. "I don't really enjoy going there," she said, adding, "The people who live there aren't very educated, and its not very clean." Further, she frowned on the rise of the popularity of barbecue restaurants in the neighborhood. Others in Jinan have noted that shaokao (Chinese-style barbecue) is exceptionally popular in the city, perhaps more so than most other places in China. However, the English teacher argued, it was only after the fairly recent arrival of restauranteurs from Xinjiang and Gansu that people in Jinan began to crave shaokao. "I think young people like to go eat shaokao and hang out with their friends," she said, "and that's why it's become so popular." But she added that she didn't like this development because this kind of lifestyle was a bit too rowdy, and perhaps a bit unsavory. Another man, himself a resident of the neighborhood, said that, in general, the neighbhorhood's status as a minority area caused it to have to fend for itself to manage sanitation and public cleanliness. In other areas, he argued, you couldn't grill outside in the open air. The smoke from the grills, the mess from the preparation, the soot from the coal were normally regulated and managed to ensure the cleanliness of the neighborhood. In the Hui Quarter, he said, such things were left alone because nobody wanted to rock the boat in a minority neighborhood.
It should be noted that these comments, which depict the neighborhood as dilapidated, poor and grimy come from people who are, themselves, Hui. They are shared, however, by Jinan's Han. For example, one Han woman explained that most Han residents of Jinan (which is to say most of the city of Jinan), rarely ventured into the Hui Quarter because it was a little luohou (落后, backward), and not very clean. This raises an interesting comparison: In Beijing, the major Hui community of NiuJie attracted visitors from all over Beijing who came to buy qingzhen food that they trusted to be sanitary and of good quality. NiuJie, by virtue of its reptuation as a place to buy safe, clean, tasty halal food, had a reputation as a tidy, clean neighborhood, whether or not this was actually the case (for what it's worth, I consider NiuJie to be just as clean as any other part of Beijing). In Jinan, the inverse picture emerges. Despite an abundance of restaurants selling halal foodstuffs, Jinan's Hui Quarter gets a reputation for being something less than 卫生 and 文明 (again, for the record, while the Hui Quarter isn't the picture of perfect cleanliness, it isn't necessarily worse than other spots in Jinan where I've previously lived). It's an interesting dynamic: a reputation for scrupulous eating and hygiene laws elevates the standing of one neighborhood, but can't transcend the perceptions of backwardness in another. There's a lot to unravel here in regard to the dynamics of inter-ethnic relationships, the definition of the boundaries of identity, and the content of ethnic identity. What this all means in the bigger picture? I'll be interested to find out. Stay tuned.