Shenzhen Metro recently announced that, from 20 July, it would introduce comprehensive entry screening. All carry-on items must pass through X-ray machines, and every passenger must also undergo a handheld security check. The operator warned that entry queues at some high-traffic stations would become longer during the morning and evening peaks. The reason for the change is not difficult to understand: summer travel and commuter traffic are overlapping, and the authorities want to reduce public-security risks. Yet once the measure took effect, congestion, waiting, and disrupted commutes quickly became the centre of discussion.
What struck me was not simply this one security measure, but a more fundamental question: how does a society balance safety, efficiency, and human dignity? When everyone must first be inspected, verified, and permitted to enter a public space, is a system responding to identifiable risks, or gradually making general suspicion the ordinary condition of life?
After living in Australia for many years, I have come to realise that I have acquired certain habits of public life. They are not simply preferences for particular shops, food, or urban rhythms. They rest on a basic expectation: when strangers meet, they generally begin by assuming that one another mean no harm, and rules exist mainly to make ordinary coexistence possible rather than to make everyone prove that they are not a problem.
I notice this expectation most clearly when I leave that environment, or when I encounter a very different commercial or administrative style within Australia itself.
This should not be reduced to a claim that people in one country are better than those in another. Public life develops through different histories of urbanisation, population density, economic development, legal institutions, administrative traditions, and patterns of risk. A society’s default attitude towards strangers is often not an abstract moral choice. It is the accumulated result of institutional experience expressed in small everyday actions.
Precisely for that reason, the difference is felt physically.
In Australia, even when there are only one or two people ahead, most people naturally stand at the end of a queue. If its shape is unclear, they may ask whether this is the end, anxious not to take someone else’s place by accident. On footpaths, people make space well before they are close; even a minor encroachment may draw a quick “sorry”. There are certainly rude people and breaches of courtesy, but the default language of public life remains restraint, space, and an effort not to impose.
Behind this is a basic trust that is neither naive nor sentimental. I do not need to trust every stranger blindly, and sensible caution still matters. But I do not normally have to begin by treating the other person as a possible threat. Nor do I usually have to keep demonstrating my innocence in order to complete an ordinary task.
This is why I have always felt uneasy about exit receipt checks in some shops. Costco’s membership model is entirely understandable, and its prices and products have real appeal. I eventually joined and later upgraded to an Executive Membership. Yet for a long time I avoided the store, not because of the membership card, but because nearly every customer was required to show a receipt before leaving. The gesture made me feel that, at the point of departure, a customer was still someone to be verified.
If the check were careful and effective, it could at least be defended as a clear risk-management measure. In practice, the process is often too hurried to match every item to every receipt. The employee knows that a full inspection is not taking place, and the customer knows it too, but both must perform the ritual seriously. It may not be effective, and it does not easily convey respect. It feels more like a small institutionalisation of general suspicion.
I recognise that those who design or carry out these arrangements may have no intention of insulting customers, and others may feel nothing of the kind. But when an ordinary person must repeatedly demonstrate that they have done nothing wrong, without any particular reason for suspicion, the practice feels demeaning to me. It may not be malicious, but it leaves one feeling treated first as a suspect rather than as someone entitled to basic trust.
I have felt something similar at Bunnings and Big W, although the process can be briefer and more relaxed. These are not grave harms, and I may be unusually sensitive to them. Yet most ordinary retail settings in Australia do not work this way. My reaction is therefore not merely personal temperament; it reflects a clash with the public culture I have come to inhabit.
The contrast becomes sharper when travelling. In some very densely populated places, where public order depends more heavily on direct control, the pressure of horns, crowds, and close physical contact can be immediate. My immediate impression is often that, within a minute of arriving, I hear more car horns than I do in a year in Australia. That is not a statistical claim. It is the powerful sensory impression left by two sharply different public rhythms colliding head-on.
Brushing against a stranger may not call for an apology. Public space can feel less like a shared field of mutual accommodation and more like a place in which one must continually secure one’s position and guard against friction. Routine screening of small bags in metro systems in some Chinese cities has given me the same feeling. It places every ordinary passenger in a prior position of suspicion, while the queues and congestion it creates can make the procedure appear neither calm nor fully effective.
I do not assume that such arrangements have no reasons. Enormous populations, high mobility, the legacy of public-security incidents, and administrative anxiety about responsibility can all push institutions towards preventive control. No society can operate on goodwill alone. The real question is not whether security measures are ever needed, but whether they are necessary, proportionate, effective, and designed to preserve the dignity and freedom of ordinary people as far as possible.
A mature public order is not one without rules, nor one that assumes everyone is good. It is one in which rules are dependable enough that most people do not need to guard against one another; enforcement is precise enough that everyone need not be treated as equally suspect; and real risks can be addressed specifically rather than through universal inconvenience and humiliation.
That is probably why, after living in Australia for so long, I find certain environments difficult to re-enter. What I value is not a society without trouble, but a better default relationship: when strangers meet, they begin by granting one another basic goodwill and room; and before society asks people to obey its rules, it recognises them as persons deserving respect.
Once that background colour becomes part of daily life, it is hard to lose. It is not merely a convenience. It is one of the quietest, and most real, ways in which civilisation is experienced by ordinary people.
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