Spit-Free Trains in China? Say It Ain’t So.

Travel Blog • Julia Ross • 12.19.07 | 10:07 AM ET

Last week, National Public Radio correspondent Rob Gifford filed a series of reports from China’s Yellow River, examining the region’s sobering environmental challenges. I was a big fan of Gifford’s China Road series, which aired on NPR in 2004 and later became a book, so I was happy to follow his recent travels. But it was the Reporter’s Notebook item Gifford posted on NPR’s web site that really got my attention, for one shocking revelation: He claims that the Chinese trains he rode while reporting the latest series were clean and spit-free.

Gifford, who is currently posted to London and had been away from China for two years, can’t believe the change in decorum. He writes, “No smoking? No spitting? This is China, I kept thinking to myself—how can they enforce no smoking and no spitting?” But they are enforcing it, he claims, and it’s working.

I’m equally incredulous. While living in China five years ago, I took a number of train trips out of Shanghai and learned to brace myself for filth and chaos. Passengers throwing orange peels on the floor and spitting in stations, long lines of migrant workers jumping the queue for tickets, bathrooms that defied description—it was all part of the unforgettable China rail experience.

If Gifford’s account is true for other parts of the country, the China travel experience is undergoing dramatic change. Great news on the cleanliness front, but I’ll admit to a little worry that the exhilaration of riding the rails won’t be the same next time I visit.

Photo of Beijing’s train station by The Wandering Angel via Flickr (Creative Commons).