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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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中国规章制度繁多，这并不是什么新发现。
去年奥运会期间，就出台了针对北京居民的各种规定，对来京看比赛的外国人也有各种规定（多达57种）。
今年在湖北省，一家县政府命令当地官员吸本地制造的烟。而在西南城市昆明，公务员被要求学会300句英语，和100句老挝语、缅甸语、泰国语和越南语，明显是为了推动当地的旅游。
周一的《纽约时报》列举了一些更加稀奇古怪的规定。比如一项法令要求中小学生在上下学途中要向过往车辆敬礼，重庆政府的一条规定未婚女性必须通过“贞洁鉴定”才能拿到被征农地补偿。
这么多任意武断的规定潜在的副作用是，人们可能更倾向于绕开那些他们并不赞同的或只是简单教条的遵守，这加速了一种无视并扭曲规则的文化。
举个小例子：上周五碧昂斯(Beyonce)在北京五棵松体育馆的演唱会上，安保人员竭力执行阻止观众起立舞蹈的明文规定。但最终，鉴于越来多的观众公然无视之加上歌手本人的鼓动，他们只好放弃。
另一个例子是臭名昭著的“绿霸”互联网过滤软件。在悄然并迅速的要求所有个人电脑生产商安装这款网络过滤软件之后，尽管一位高层官员表示该要求“考虑不周，表述不清，并给大家强制执行的印象”，但鉴于外国公司和中国互联网用户的呼吁，有关部门还是对这一要求做出了让步，。
在讨论中国法治进程的时候，法学专家常常提到，中国纸面上已经有了很多非常充分的法律，但真正挑战是执行。如果现行的类似法规较少，那么让受其影响较大的人群参与制定，或许就能被更认真执行了。
