Originally published at: http://boingboing.net/2015/08/14/chinese-theme-park-queue-jumpi.html
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Maybe not unique to China, but very rare at Disneyland or Disney World in my experience.
I’ve got to admit - nothing brings out my inner fascist like people fucking with the queue
THERE WILL BE ORDER!!!
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Not unique to China, but very common there.
My wife is ethnically Chinese and a native Mandarin speaker, but not from PRC. We lived in Beijing for a while and to start with she was constantly chiding me for getting irritated at queue jumpers. I was failing to appropriately adjust to the local culture, apparently …
Anyway, it got to her in the end. 
An elderly couple barged their way in front of her in a queue to buy tickets for The Forbidden City. And she angrily let rip with “你们中国人为什么不会排队？！” (Why don’t you Chinese know how to queue?!) at them … Which got her lots of strange looks and entertaining questions about what she thought she was anyway?
Then we were finally able to share stories about how atrociously inconsiderate everyone was in public and it wasn’t such a culture shock any more. 
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Wow. That was a flashback to every f-ing multi-generational family group (regardless of ethnicity) I’ve dealt with at Disneyland. You’d think that not allowing four generations of offspring to all ride in the same boat as their matriarch would result in being written out of her will.
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Not a Chinese story, but a Korean-American woman I used to work with described all the aggression and elbow-throwing at the cosmetic counter in a South Korean department store that she experienced on a visit there once. She was quite shocked at the lack of decorum by the ladies present.
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I don’t mind line jumpers, I just hope they forgive me for being clumsy and stepping on their feet or scraping their shin with my boot or falling down on them with a drink in my hand. Oops.
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Its an interesting contrast because I noticed that Seoul subway stations have breathing apparatus ready for emergencies. In many western countries kids would have stolen it long ago.
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If you live in Taiwan you know this all too well. Go to any tourist site (especially Sun Moon Lake) and it’ll be mobbed with tourists from China. Shouting, shoving, littering and using the streets as a bathroom (I wish I was exaggerating). The queue-jumping technique is usually simple. Just do it openly and assume nobody is going to question you. If they do then start acting irate at them, as if they are the ones at fault. Even the local businesses are now speaking out against them seeing as Chinese tourists tend to actual spend very little in comparison to others.
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Or what people on Toronto Transit call …rush hour.
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I know here in the South life moves a little slower, but this sounds like a recipe for a self induced ass beating…
I think single file lines were pretty stressed in elementary school, at least back in my day.
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I saw a version of this at Disneyland last week as we waited to see their Fantasmic show. We had gotten a good position on a railing that would allow our kids to see the show while we stood behind them. There was another family next to us and we had chatted and established our spaces and kind of mutually stood our ground against some folks who thought they could just shove in. Then this woman comes pushing in past us trying to get to the railing asking us if her poor elderly parents could just sit down along the railing until the show started and they promise they will move back, they’re so tired and desperately need to get off their feet. They make a big scene about fanning them and passing them bottles of water. But of course by the time the show starts the entire family is standing there with them, they don’t move back at all but rather the “poor tired” parents are standing there trying to shove in past my daughter, telling her she needs to move so they can see, even getting angry with her when she refuses. My daughter stood her ground and even made room for her younger brother. After some nasty looks from everyone around them they finally backed down. But man it was So infuriating. But of course no one really forces the issue much because nobody wants to be the asshole at the happiest place on earth in front of your kids.
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I remember during the universal exposition EXPO’92 (celebrating the discovery of America) the long queues and how uncivic were some people.
I was eleven at that time and I was a pretty well educated and considerate little gentlemen and it SHOCKED me how old people would push their way through the queue by force or sheer dickery.
I was taught to respect my elders and be nice to foreigners, but that morning at France’s pavilion queue I found that french elders were freaking assholes. They came and shove me and my friends (we were eleven at that time) out of the queue and looked down on us as like we were little shits.
That was the first time that I made my mind and decided to fight for what it was right and told that old lady to go fuck herself.
DO YOU HEAR ME YOU OLD OCTOGENARIAN FRENCH LADY!? I HOPE YOU ARE DEAD! In fact, as that happened 23 years ago I expect you to be already quite dead, but if you are not remember the little Spanish boy you shoved out of a queue and die in SHAME and REGRET.
By the way, I never got to enter France’s pavilion out of pure spite.
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By golly, if tried that over here in England they’d get a good tutting at!
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Here in Virginia, at King’s Dominion, line jumpers get ejected. Not just from the line, from the whole park.
I was waiting in line for a roller coaster and a family tried the wandering lost child gambit and ended up in front of me.
I happened to be recording the roller coaster going around with my phone at the time and captured them doing it. I confronted them about it when they didn’t move out of place after “finding” the kid, and they pretended not to speak english. I said “Ok look I heard you shouting in english to your child not 1 minute ago. You can pretend you can’t answer me but I know you understand me. If you don’t leave the line right now I’m going to get a line monitor over here and you’ll get kicked out of the whole park without a refund.” No response. So I went and got a line monitor, showed them the video, and they said they’d take care of it. A minute later 5 beefy dudes came over and surrounded the family, the line monitor told them they were banned from the park and they had to leave now. They tried to cry and complain about their elderly mother on a bench somewhere but the beef was having none of it. Apparently they’d been ejected for doing this before, ON THAT SAME RIDE, and this was the last straw. They were perma-banned from the park, persona-non-grata, not welcome even. My schadenfreude was strong that day.
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They know how to tut in Blimey.
It may even require some quiet mutters of “honestly!” and “the nerve[of some people]…” Not directed at the queue jumpers themselves of course, nobody likes to make a scene after all.
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Pretty sure this is the appropriate response to line jumpers.
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