Returning to live in China after almost two decades requires regular recalibration of nostalgia. So much of the once familiar is now novel. Beijing has lost the half-built, half-demolished look that was its architectural vibe in the first decade of the millennium. Erstwhile models in the capital city’s Urban Planning Museum are now corporeal creatures, glistening in improbable shapes. From the two metro lines that used to serve selected parts of central Beijing, the city subway system now boasts 30 lines connecting 524 stations. The six, multi-lane, ring roads that encircle the capital are flooded with electric vehicles so modern they look on the cusp of levitating.All this being true, Beijing 2026 is not just Beijing 2006 with fancier buildings and better infrastructure. It is that, but the upgraded hardware has also boosted the software, aka, civic behaviour. China is led by engineers; impressive constructions have been its forte for decades. In the oughties, the tougher ask had been improving what was domestically dubbed as the “civilisational levels” (文明水平 or wénmíng shuǐpíng ) of the average Zhou.In preparation for the Chinese capital hosting the 2008 Olympic Games, the authorities had identified five lacunae in Beijing’s social etiquette: Beijing-style name-calling, casual spitting, littering, disorderly queuing and a lack of smiling. To create “courteous communities,” the city government had instituted a “civilisation-evaluation index” that ranked neighbourhoods according to their levels of refinement. Sharing housework, speaking a foreign language, large book-collections and balconies displaying potted plants boosted a neighbourhood’s score on the index, while spitting, alcohol abuse, raising pigeons, rearing livestock at home and noisiness were black marks.As an Indian, the country’s feel in those days had been unexpectedly familiar. Before moving to Beijing, I’d imagined China to be inscrutable – both chopsticks and characters beyond me. But once I’d begun walking the city’s crisscrossing warren of hutong alleyways, what I’d noticed was the familiar cadence of itinerant vendors – selling everything from goldfish in plastic bags to candied hawthorn fruit and coal briquettes – as they slowly bicycled past the faded glory of courtyard-style homes.I was delighted in the sizzle of street food and noted how strangers addressed each other as family: auntie, grandmother, older brother. There was full throated spitting by the flâneurs who ambled along the streets, often with caged songbirds in hand. Queues existed more on a theoretical plane than in physical form. Taxi interiors were dusted with cigarette ash, locals hitched their vests over their bellies when the weather was warm, sewage was a scent, conversations on the phone were loud, demonstrating scant awareness of the existence of the ears of other people in the vicinity.It wasn’t rare to spot a child dressed in kaidangku, (literally open-crotch pants that were slit around the buttocks), a choice that combined maximum convenience, with minimum coverage. Children thus outfitted were able to answer the call of nature anywhere on the streets without the fuss of actually having to pull their trousers down.Chinese cities at the time, even the poshest like Beijing and Shanghai, still had much of the village about them. Migrant workers flooded the constructionscapes that were building the cities anew. Their mannerisms were of the village: less hush, less sophistication. People squatted on top of western style toilet seats. Transgressions of aural and personal space were the norm rather than the exception.Westerners found it all remarkable. To Indian me, it was a comforting normality. A little bit of home in a foreign land. Twenty years later, in 2026, it is the upgrade in civic software rather than the long-impressive hardware that asks for unpacking.Behaviour is notoriously harder to engineer than buildings. A recent trip to the Fragrant Hills in western Beijing on a newly constructed metro line, had me marveling at the improved crowd-management. Despite massive groups of domestic tourists from around the country thronging the area, in what would not-so-long-ago have been a scenario for a potential stampede, the crowds moved in relative order. The park environs were spick and span with no litter in sight; not a single old codger sneaking a cigarette.There was some amount of strident rule-announcing on loudspeakers: stay on the designated tracks, no smoking etc., but overall, it was possible to enjoy the natural beauty, notwithstanding the hordes of day-trippers. The toilets were not fragrant, despite the nomenclature of the spot itself, but they were clean, and the seats were free of the tell-tale footprints that indicate squatting rather than sitting. Barely anyone gave me, an obvious foreigner, a second glance. In contrast, there was a time in 2002 when a cyclist fell off his bike in his shock at having spotted dark-skinned me walking along a road in the outskirts of Beijing.So how had the Chinese been pacified/disciplined/habituated to ways of behaviour that went so against their until-very-recent, loophole-finding, chaos-shuffling, phlegm-expectorating deportment in public spaces?The answer, as answers to sociological questions invariably are, is multipronged.Some of it is more money. As people become richer, their etiquette “upgrades” to match their material circumstances. The per capita income of Beijingers in 2025, was approximately USD 13,000. Twenty years earlier, in 2005, it had been five times less at USD2,600. There is a classic progression from survival norms as the de facto setting of people’s psyches, towards bourgeois self-regulation, as incomes increase and a new middle class with reputational stakes is formed. At certain income levels people start to care about more than just getting by in a dog-eat-dog world. Concerns like refinement and the social scrutiny of others begin to takes their place in the ontology of the city dweller.What has unfolded over the last two decades in the larger Chinese cities is a temporally compressed process of urbanisation. This is not just about the mass movement of people from rural to urban areas, but a settling into of urban norms. Large parts of Beijing twenty years ago were essentially agglomerations of urban villages: a phenomenon that is familiar to anyone who knows contemporary Indian cities.In the forms of address and dress, the sociology of public space where the communal trumped the individual, the rules that governed interpersonal interactions-based on assumptions of reciprocity rather than abstract concepts of civic space, there is a long phase in the process of urbanisation when the village lingers in the city. In the larger of China’s metropoles this phase is speeding towards completion, and with it we see the concomitant transformation of people’s “software” to a more urban iteration.And then of course, the hardware influences software directly. A beautiful street with ample dustbins will automatically promote less littering. Better toilets, broad roads, clean waterways, tree-lined public spaces shape behaviour, encouraging people to interact with and use them in more respectful, considered ways. One of the most noticeable physical differences between the Beijing of today and the one I knew in the oughties is the greenery. Targeted afforestation between 2012 and the early 2020s, saw the city add 2.19 million mu of green space – roughly the size of 219 Olympic Forest Parks with the addition of 103 million trees. The look and feel of public space is an important determinant of how people behave within it.A final, and crucial, piece of the puzzle in the software upgrade of Beijingers is increased surveillance. China’s capital today is bathed in cameras, a substantial proportion of which went up during COVID to ensure compliance with pandemic-era rules and were never disabled. From traffic intersections to subway stations, public parks and random points along the urbanscape, the panopticon of surveillance cameras is a pervasive fact of city life. According to some estimates (there are no official ones), larger cities in China have 370-odd cameras per 1,000 people.The cold fact is that big city life in China is unfolds within an environment where every infraction is potentially recorded, so that people anticipate being observed. Surveillance may not have created civic behaviour – urban norms were already emerging because of improved material circumstances and better infrastructure – but it certainly results in a degree of self-policing and consequently, less behavioural slippage in public spaces. People often revert to “bad” but “easy” habits, like littering or spitting, when they think no one is watching. But in a city like Beijing the cameras ensure a sense that someone is always watching, regardless of whether this is fact or not.None of this should be read to mean that China has morphed into a nation-sized team of synchronised swimmers. There is still enough ongoing chaos, shuffling, rule-bending – and yes, spitting – to enable someone like me, who has returned to the country after a 17-year-long break, to orient themselves. On a recent weekend, the display beds in IKEA’s flagship store in Beijing were reassuringly filled with nappers, à la 2005.Pajama couture remains haute fashion in the older, hutong neighbourhoods. Exploring the city on a bicycle, as I do almost daily, is reassurance that the Taoist spirit is alive and kicking in the Middle Kingdom. In the world of the Beijing bicyclist, Cartesian logic never held much truck. The way of the Tao is intuitive and profound, with little time for illusory trifles like zebra crossings and one-way roads, security cameras be damned.The Chinese, I would conclude, are natural loophole-finders rather than rule-followers in the Japanese vein. They are Taosits trapped in Confucian bodies, engaged in a constant acrobatic act between their individualistic, jugaad-oriented instincts, and the order-seeking, paternalistic diktats that they are also culturally conditioned to obey – a tendency reinforced by massive surveillance.There has certainly been a software upgrade in civic behaviour, but it’s an upgrade with Chinese characteristics.Journalist and writer Pallavi Aiyar brings the Indian perspective to understanding China. With ‘Writing on the Great Wall’, she places her eye on China’s economy, its culture, its government and its people. Aiyar has spent more than two decades studying China, having lived there from 2002 to 2009, and again from August 2025.