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It's not a new revelation that China has a lot of rules.
Last year, there were rules for Beijing residents during the Olympics, and also rules for foreigners who came to town for the games (57 of them!).
This year, in Hubei province, a county government infamously ordered local officials to smoke locally-produced cigarettes, while civil servants in the southwestern city of Kunming were ordered to learn 300 English sentences and 100 sentences in Lao, Burmese, Thai and Vietnamese, apparently to promote tourism in the region.
Monday's New York Times looks at some even more bizarre manifestations of rules run amok, such as an edict requiring schoolchildren to salute all passing vehicles on their way to and from school, and the Chongqing rule that 'forced unmarried women to pass a chastity test before receiving compensation for farmland appropriated by the government.'
A potential side effect of so many seemingly arbitrary rules is that people may feel more inclined to skirt rules that they disagree with, or are simply too cumbersome to follow on a regular basis, fueling a culture of rule-bending and ignoring.
A minor example: At Beyonce's concert at Beijing's Wukesong Stadium Friday, security personnel struggled to enforce an apparent rule against concertgoers standing up to dance. Eventually, in light of the increasing numbers of people openly flouting the prohibition, and the singer's own exhortations for the crowd to get up and dance, the guards simply gave up.
A bigger case involved the notorious Green Dam Internet filtering software. After hastily, and quietly, demanding that all PC makers install Web filtering software, an outcry among foreign companies and Chinese Internet users moved authorities to backpedal on the requirement, with a senior official acknowledging that the regulation 'wasn't fully considered, and not expressed clearly, and gave everyone the impression that this is mandatory.'
When discussing the development of the rule of law in China, legal experts often note that China has many perfectly sufficient laws on the books, but that the real challenge is enforcement. And rules might be taken more seriously if there were fewer of them, made with the input of those who are affected by them.
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中國規章制度繁多，這并不是什么新發現。
去年奧運會期間，就出臺了針對北京居民的各種規定，對來京看比賽的外國人也有各種規定（多達57種）。
今年在湖北省，一家縣政府命令當地官員吸本地制造的煙。而在西南城市昆明，公務員被要求學會300句英語，和100句老撾語、緬甸語、泰國語和越南語，明顯是為了推動當地的旅游。
周一的《紐約時報》列舉了一些更加稀奇古怪的規定。比如一項法令要求中小學生在上下學途中要向過往車輛敬禮，重慶政府的一條規定未婚女性必須通過“貞潔鑒定”才能拿到被征農地補償。
這么多任意武斷的規定潛在的副作用是，人們可能更傾向于繞開那些他們并不贊同的或只是簡單教條的遵守，這加速了一種無視并扭曲規則的文化。
舉個小例子：上周五碧昂斯(Beyonce)在北京五棵松體育館的演唱會上，安保人員竭力執行阻止觀眾起立舞蹈的明文規定。但最終，鑒于越來多的觀眾公然無視之加上歌手本人的鼓動，他們只好放棄。
另一個例子是臭名昭著的“綠霸”互聯網過濾軟件。在悄然并迅速的要求所有個人電腦生產商安裝這款網絡過濾軟件之后，盡管一位高層官員表示該要求“考慮不周，表述不清，并給大家強制執行的印象”，但鑒于外國公司和中國互聯網用戶的呼吁，有關部門還是對這一要求做出了讓步，。
在討論中國法治進程的時候，法學專家常常提到，中國紙面上已經有了很多非常充分的法律，但真正挑戰是執行。如果現行的類似法規較少，那么讓受其影響較大的人群參與制定，或許就能被更認真執行了。
