Seen this one yet?  A baby pees into a paper cup with help from his parents while at a table in a restaurant.  It happened at a restaurant called Xiabuxiabu in Beijing.  It made the front page of a Beijing newspaper and the English language post on Beijing Cream has gone viral.  Supposedly there’s even a video of this “event.”  What I find especially interesting is reports that other people in the restaurant at the time complained to the management, who did nothing about it, suggesting that these are rich people and therefore can get away with anything.  It’s the Beverly Hillbillies moved to Beijing!

(This coverage of it over at Gawker is funny – mostly because the comments have turned into a conversation between two people on where to hang out in Hong Kong.)

My first, um, exposure to this sort of activity was in 1997 when I was in Xi’an – that was my first time to see Chinese babies with that button-crotch underwear taking leaks and dumps right in the street.  Here’s a pic of a kid taking a leak in the street in Mong Kok in 2009.

What can one say?  You can’t indict a country of 1.5 billion people over this but at the same time, this sort of thing does not seem to be a rare occurrence.  Unfortunately some of these people bring this behavior with them when they come to visit Hong Kong.  The oft-quoted litany about “5,000 years of Chinese history” adds up to what exactly?