The Potty is Political

Five years ago, when I lived in China and nature called, I always prepared to hold my breath and grab the roll of toilet paper I always carried with me. Back then, squat toilets were the norm, and for a "Westerner" like me, squatting was something that just had to be beared.

A neighborhood squat toilet in Beijing

Throughout the years I've had conversations with Chinese friends and relatives who stood (squatted?) firmly behind (in front of?) squat toilets. They argued that it was more hygienic, because your bottom didn't touch the bowl. I've never really gotten used to it though, and if there is a choice, I'll always choose a sit-down toilet.

Today, "western" toilets are as common as the squatters, and in my un-expert opinion, may be surpassing the squat toilets. Just before the Olympics, Beijing made sure to provide sitting toilets precisely because they knew that many foreign visitors are just accustomed to that style.

During test events months before the games such as the March baseball game against the San Diego Padres and the Los Angeles Dodgers, the city received frequent complaints about squat toilets from foreigners. And so sit down toilets were added. Today at the major Olympic venues most toilets were retrofitted into sit downs.

In a Xinghua article in June, reporter Rong Jiaojiao also wrote about the city's three-year, $57 million, campaign to modernize its non-venue public toilets ahead of the Games. He described the old toilets as "fetid back-street privies" that are to be replaced with "clean, well-maintained flush toilets."

The article aslo quoted Ma Kangding, a city official, who said: "The construction and management of the toilets in a city reflects the level of civilization and living standards of a society."

A sit-down toilet in Beijing.

Ma also chastised Chinese people who stand on the "Western" toilet seats or steal toilet paper, saying that they had to change their "bad habits." The government also created pamphlets to promote "civilized behavior" which include toilet use, spitting and cutting in lines.

The question of hygiene (and lots of other things) in China seems to be less about germs and more about being "civilized." Vanderbilt University professor Ruth Rogaski wrote about how hygiene was crucial element in creating a modern China in her book Hygienic Modernity.

One of her key points is the use of the Chinese term weisheng or 卫生. Before the late 1800s, weisheng had a more spiritual element and was associated with diet, meditation and self-medication. In the last century however, weisheng became known as its modern usage, a word meaning hygienic or sanitary.

Rogaski wrote that the new meaning of the word came with the arrival of violent imperialism in China which turned a once-cosmological word into a concept associated with national sovereignty, the cleanliness of bodies, laboratory knowledge, and the fitness of races: categories that the Chinese were often "deemed lacking by foreign observers and Chinese elites alike."

Over email, the professor told me that it was actually the sit/squat debate that led her to first want to investigate the question of hygiene in China. While her research predates the sit/squat question -- which occurred in the 1980s during China's reform era -- it was living in China at that time that led Rogaski to ponder the question.

As any proper scholar would hedge Rogaski said she's not researched the sit/squat issue, so her views on the debate are purely as a Westerner who has been visiting China for more than two decades. Here's what she had to say:

For the indecisive: A win-win situation.

"In the early 80s, it struck me that the greatest cultural divide between my fellow American exchange students and the Chinese was that the Americans refused to use squat toilets. In fact, Americans couldn't stop talking about the squat toilets -- they had a deep fear and loathing of them... My sense is that the great squat vs. sit debate is less about hygiene per se and more about style of bodily deportment. For the most part, Westerners can't squat. They aren't used to squatting, it's difficult for them to squat.

Perhaps Westerners probably also perceive a squat toilet as making their body closer to that which they are trying to eliminate. And my most indelicate observation: a Western meat-based diet tends to make for more difficult, more time-consuming elimination... In the end, neither style of toilet is sanitary if it's not flushed and not kept clean."

And there you have it, still no resolution to the question.

For a really hilarious commentary on the "Asian squat" check out this short by writer/director Daniel Hsia.