Quoting Confucius and President Jiang Zemin, officials have ordered people to talk more politely to one another.
A front-page People's Daily editorial said manners had yet to recover from the damage inflicted by the Gang of Four during the Ten Years of Chaos.
The Communist Party paper said some people needed to go back to basics and make up for the lessons they missed by learning to say things like 'hello', 'please', 'thank you', 'sorry', 'it doesn't matter' and 'goodbye'.
There were a few leaders and cadres with rude language and behaviour whenever they opened their mouths, said the paper.
It said when the country was founded everyone was moral and polite under the guidance of the party but Lin Biao and the Gang of Four encouraged people to smash everything.
Extreme leftist thinking held that behaving with morals, manners and according to the law should be condemned as feudal, capitalist and revisionist.
