Crowds in China cannot be ignored. Certainly, in confined spaces like trains, coaches and planes, just a trio of excited Chinese talking all at once is enough to grab your attention, willingly or not.

Why is it that we talk so loudly? I asked my young Chinese colleagues, and they came up with a very interesting theory.

It's the loudspeaker mentality, they say with conviction.

Not so long ago, being able to speak through a loudspeaker meant you were a person of authority. Only leaders had the privilege of rousing the community in the morning or at noon for daily lessons on how to be better citizens.

It was so throughout those turbulent decades of the 60s to 70s, and that was probably when the "loud and proud" culture seeped into general consciousness.

I am tempted to subscribe to this because loudspeakers still blare daily from the school next door, broadcasting the discipline master's constant displeasure on how slow the students are gathering for assembly, or how lethargic they are in doing the mandatory morning exercises.

Frankly, the microphone is redundant. He is loudly intimidating enough to almost scare us in our apartments into going through the motions with the students down below.

It is a strange concept for me, having been transplanted two generations ago to another mainly urban Chinese community abroad that still clings tenaciously to the Confucian tenets of gentility, propagated in properly muted tones.

My own theory is that we are natural show-offs, no matter the nationality.

Take the young businessman sitting behind me on the high-speed train back from Tianjin recently.

He was toying with his latest iPhone 5 all the way. How do I know? Because the distinctive cricket ring tone was chirping non-stop throughout the half-hour journey.

I was made aware he was going to Urumqi on a business trip the next day to close a 400,000 yuan ($65,762) deal, and that he had got someone at his office to book his flight, business class.

So all of us are now privy to the fact that he is an important person trusted to sign important deals, and that he demands to be transported in style. We were in the first class train carriage after all.

In another train voyage from Guilin to Laibin in Guangxi this year, a young mother sitting opposite us in the crammed carriage was gently telling her son not to shout.

She cajoled him, made sure he did not kick us too often, and her husband quietly offered to help us with our bulky luggage at the end of the line. She's from Laibin, by no means a large city, but she had the earth-anchored qualities of a diligent middle-class working wife and mother.

Her most redeeming quality was the fact that she was teaching her young child how to behave in public.

It seems that at least two to three generations of Chinese have forgotten how to teach their children manners, or at least lost the ability to differentiate between loving indulgence and raising a public menace.

If China is to allow the world to better understand it, then perhaps we should start looking at how we are represented both at home and abroad. Every Chinese who steps out of the country is a cultural ambassador, and the entire nation is often judged by that one person who misbehaves.

Unfortunately, opinion is dictated by chance encounters.

It is only when the vast majority of Chinese going abroad manage to speak in civilized tones, learn to wait in line like the rest of the passengers and have the subtle sense to moderate their purchasing excesses that we will present China as what it is: A world leader in economics and culture that has had 5,000 years to perfect the art of civilization.

Contact the writer at paulined@chinadaily.com.cn.

(China Daily USA 10/29/2013 page8)