IT happens all the time: Men rush to the nearest public toilet and urinal and are about to relieve themselves when they see puddles of urine below and around the urinals.

The need is urgent. Just go ahead. But it is disgusting to stand in a smelly puddle and soil your shoes because many men don’t aim well and don’t care.

What to do? To pee or not to pee? Or to go outside and urinate against a wall? Many men do it.

After many years of failed hygiene education about the need to aim precisely into the urinals, Shenzhen authorities decided to play hardball and issue fines for offenders.

In late August the urban management bureau of the southern Chinese metropolis issued a regulation stipulating that anyone caught urinating outside a public urinal be fined 100 yuan (US$16.30).

We have seen bizarre legislation before, but this one cannot possibly be exceeded in absurdity.

A lot of Internet users greeted the regulation with sarcasm and questions such as “How do the legal enforcement squads plan to catch offenders?” “Will cameras be used to identify violations?”

These questions hit the bull’s eye of the implementation problem that looks likely to doom the regulation. According to urban management officials in Shenzhen, there are no plans to install surveillance cameras in public toilets.

In response, Shenzhen authorities said the regulation isn’t about correcting behavior through fines.

“This regulation seeks to warn and educate the public, to promote civilized toilet manners. Collecting fines is not its purpose,” the Beijing Times newspaper quoted an official named Yuan Hongwei as saying on August 29.

Pointless signs

China is probably among the few places on earth where we can see pointless signs plastered on walls in public toilets that urge people to step closer to the urinals and flush after use. Some of the silliest are written in English, including, “A small step forward, a big step toward civilization!” As if that one small step distinguishes barbarians from civilized humans.

For a long time I have wondered what purpose the signs serve if they are just ignored outright.

Distraction? They are too awkwardly worded to be worth looking at. Attempts at humor? Maybe, but they aren’t very funny. A cause for reflection? No.

In fact, what these signs couldn’t achieve the new toilet regulation won’t accomplish either.

To cite People’s Daily, the regulation is a symbol of lan zheng, or lazy politics — a byword for poor public governance that relies solely on fines and unfeasible decrees to address social issues.

In criticizing Shenzhen’s move, the Party newspaper also argued, in a September 4 editorial, that precious legal resources are wasted on tackling the toilet mess, whereas education, health-care and other significant issues deserve more attention. Local lawmakers’ ideas about civic legislation are wide of the mark — like the puddles of urine on bathroom floors.

This issue seems trivial, but it indicates a larger issue.

As the place where people deposit body waste, public toilets and what happens in them can be examined and provoke discussion about the national ethos.

For instance, German and Japanese emphasis on clean toilets is a symbol of their national affinity for hygiene and cleanliness.

But even in some generally squalid places, toilet sanitation is way more desirable than in China.

Once I used a toilet on a Philippines tourist island. The place was sandy and littered with garbage. I had expected a pit latrine, but, to my surprise, a guide showed me to a cubicle with shiny ceramic floor tiles and a well-scrubbed toilet in the middle. Before I went inside, she dutifully poured water on my feet to rinse off the sand and grit that had stuck to them.

Stains and cigarette butts

In comparison, the rest-rooms in many Chinese tourist attractions reflect an apparent failure in human evolution, in the sense that they showcase Chinese lack of empathy for others and lack of concerns for public health.

Besides the puddles of urine and deep yellow, foul-smelling stains — indication of scant maintenance — cigarette butts are also commonly tossed into urinals, blocking the basin and causing it to overflow with urine.

The very Chinese who turn public loos into a mess don’t spray urine in their own bathrooms, of course, but in a public place, the sense of guilt is quickly diluted by the number of people who are doing the same.

And mind you, this is a vicious cycle — one misses the target and wets on the floor, leading those after him to miss as well since they have to stand away from the puddle, which gathers as a result.

So we witness the strange scene of ayis, female sanitation workers, freely entering and leaving men’s rest-rooms, going about their work and boldly exhorting men to stand closer to urinals, without any sense of embarrassment. It is often the men who feel embarrassed.

A colleague once tole me he was urinating in a public rest-room and heard an ayi yelling at him from behind, “Hey, you, step forward!” She was oblivious to any enlightened values of privacy.

Little painted bug

In stoking concerns about privacy rather than generating any empathy, these ayis are perhaps more efficient than any half-baked signs plastered in toilets.

But in a society where privacy is more and more cherished, it will be increasingly difficult for them just to barge into the rest-room when men are relieving themselves.

A method widely employed in Europe, which I have seen, is to paint a fly in the urinal, so that men find something to aim at.

Studies found that the little painted bug keeps bathrooms as much as 85 percent cleaner. This is a perfect illustration of how people, when positively nudged, can behave in a better way.

So if the fly is a proven method that costs little, why not replicate it here?

In addressing the toilet mess, our policy-makers obviously need to be imaginative, or consult behavioral scientists, to come up with witty ways to change behavior.

Fines are becoming an anachronism in modern governance.

Unlike Singapore, we are not a “fine” country. Fines may work for Singapore, but not necessarily for China, which is tens of thousands of times larger than the city-state. Moreover, some people cannot be coerced into obeying rules. Fines make them bitter and vengeful.

In a larger sense, public management is the art and skill of guiding and motivating people, not coercing them, to behave as authorities want them to behave. From cracking down on jaywalking to improving toilet etiquette, people in charge might do well to think outside the box.

A softer, humanistic approach is preferable to penalties, which are a sign of failure, if officials constantly resort to it.