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Even those whose sole experience with China involve booze-fueled stopovers are probably familiar with the local custom of ignoring lines, regulations and courtesy except insofar as they provide opportunities for graft. This is cute for a while in the 入乡随俗 spirit of adventuring, but gets old fast once you realize there aren’t many other places where customs involve getting spit on while biking to work.

But rushing past that, let me devote this post to complaining about something I’ll call the Shanghai cab-shuffle. This behavior isn’t unique to Shanghai, but it’s particularly egregious here, perhaps because it’s impossible to get a cab in normal circumstances and desperate times call for desperate measures when you’re hustling through life and need to get to a club pronto.

Those with experience in northern China are probably nodding, and thinking “nothing special here”. And to be fair, the shuffle is not unknown in the northern hinterlands. You see it a lot during traffic jams or Mongol invasions when social order collapses and the Beihai economy picks up. Even in these circumstances though, I think the northern shuffle is a more furtive beast, and you’ve got a decent chance of shaming someone by calling them a dick in Chinese. In Shanghai, I don’t think anyone would bat an eyelid at this — screwing your neighbour is not only commonplace, it’s expected.

Put another way, Shanghai elevates hostile, feigned oblivion to an art. After all, getting a cab is not exactly a subtle diversion. At a minimum, it involves wading into the bike lane and pumping your arm using the sort of repetitive motion that centuries of evolution have trained human eyes to notice lest it involve wolves leaping out from undergrowth. In Shanghai, the atavistic response to seeing this is to walk two meters over and try to flag one down first. This is such pointless behavior it’s baffling to see it on a large scale: does no-one ever just snap in this country? But then astonishment turns to something else when you realize that people here really do value saving a bit of time over visibly and unapologetically screwing their neighbour. In a sign that irony might be divine but stupidity is definitely human, I noticed each of the people who shuffled me tonight getting progressively angry at being shuffled in turn. But when the fifth person showed up, something happened that I’d never seen before….

I saw hesitation on his face.

Had courtesy for the common man crept into someone’s heart? Was he wondering WHO he should stand behind? Curious which of our four lines was “moving fastest”, so to speak? Not at all! He was panicking because he couldn’t inch any CLOSER to oncoming traffic without wading right out into the road and getting flattened by a bus. Which was when I started walking home, contemplating that any city that requires you to wage pointless and silent battles for street positioning needs a heart.