Manners maketh the mainland
Beijing socialites are signing up to the country's first school of etiquette, writes Simon Parry, and its Hong Kong-born founder is on a mission to reawaken traditions of courtesy
They buy more Bentleys than the British, fill their luxury homes with more Swarovski crystal than the Swiss and spend more on Louis Vuitton and Versace than the French or the Italians. But one precious commodity, it seems, has eluded the citizens of the mainland in the country's extraordinary rise from developing nation to economic superpower: manners.
Officials have at times been so exasperated by their tendency to spit, shout, slurp food and push in at queues that campaigns have been launched pleading with people to show more decorum.
But now, for the first time on the mainland, it seems that money can buy you perfect manners. A school of etiquette is about to open in Beijing, with classes based on those of the world-renowned Swiss finishing schools, all but one of which are now closed.
Founded by a well-bred Hong Kong businesswoman who herself attended that Swiss school (the Institut Villa Pierrefeu), Institute Sarita offers an exclusive clientele lessons in being classy - for an appropriately princely sum, of course. Courses cost from 20,000 yuan (HK$24,600) to 100,000 yuan and the school - based in the five-star Park Hyatt Beijing hotel - aims to teach local debutantes and society wives how to behave impeccably in polite society at home and abroad.
Sara Jane Ho - who names Britain's Duchess of Cambridge, Kate Middleton, as the ideal modern role model for young women in China - believes the perfect manners the daughters and wives of the mainland's super-rich learn will trickle down through society.
Two months before her school officially opens, dozens of well-heeled women are queuing for teaser classes on how to use a knife and fork, how to peel fruit, how to greet a prospective mother-in-law, how to walk in heels and how to eat soup without slurping. Meanwhile, high-powered bosses of state-owned firms are hiring Ho - who lived in London as a child and speaks with a plummy British accent - for private lessons in how to conduct themselves socially and at business meetings in the West.
Sipping elegantly and noiselessly from a bowl of vegetable soup in a trendy Beijing restaurant, the 27-year-old Harvard Business School graduate says the mainland managed to misplace its manners during the Cultural Revolution of the 1960s and 70s.
