Yesterday I called the public service hotline (0451-12345) of Harbin in northeast China's Heilongjiang Province to express my support for a sanitation worker, who, on August 3, politely persuaded a man not to litter in a riverside plaza but was instead ridiculed by the latter.

It all began with a viral video shot by a tourist and later picked by many media outlets, including Xinhua news agency, in which a young man deliberately threw shreds of bread to the ground after a senior sanitation worker wearing a green uniform tried to dissuade him from littering in a public place. The sanitation worker had already cleaned the ground of melon seed shells thrown earlier by the same man.

While many netizens blamed the young man for lacking respect for the sanitation worker and social etiquette, most lamented that even the police may not have been able to punish the perpetrator, because littering in this case is not a crime.

Indeed, is there no way to discipline the man who littered while uttering hurtful words to the sanitation worker? Unlike the netizens who were resigned to the idea that nothing could be done except for a moral reprimand, I searched the Internet for any relevant regulations.

In the end, I discovered that a regulation on civil behavior, which took effect in 2020 in the city of Harbin, stipulates clearly that anyone who litters a public ground with such waste as fruit peels or shreds of paper can be fined 100 yuan (US$14) by urban management and law enforcement staff. In addition, those who litter can be ordered to clear the waste. Yes, littering is not a crime to be handled by the police but it's bad enough to justify a treatment beyond a mere moral reprimand.

Further research led me to discover a national regulation on urban household waste management, which took effect in 2007. It also states that no one is allowed to throw waste at will and that those who violate the regulation are subject to fines meted out by local environmental and sanitation authorities.

Message passed

With these discoveries, I called the Harbin hotline without hesitation. It turned out that the lady who answered my call was extremely patient. After listening to my suggestion that urban management and law enforcement staff can effectively handle littering offenses, she repeated my message word for word and then passed it on to relevant local sanitation authorities. She said she appreciated my intention to help Harbin's sanitation workers better square up to uncivil behaviors in the future.

It was the first time I had called a public service hotline of another city, but I felt I had done the right thing. Littering in public places seems to be trivial, but it can lead to unexpected results, such as causing mosquitoes to gather or creating trouble for pedestrians.

The Paper, a leading news portal based in Shanghai, reported on August 1 that a local court in southwest China's Sichuan Province recently ruled that a property management firm can be held partially responsible for an accident which caused a pedestrian to suffer severe injury.

It so happened that a person surnamed Liu tripped over uncollected dog poop in a residential community in Jiangyou City and suffered a severe leg injury. Because the dog owner could not be found (due to lack of relevant surveillance records), Liu sued the property management firm. The local court eventually decided that Liu was 70 percent at fault for the accident, while the property management firm was 30 percent at fault.

It's not my intention here to discuss whether the court decision was fair. What matters here is the missing dog owner. Is he or she aloof from a due interrogation of conscience? Did he or she foresee that their bad habit of littering the ground with dog feces could cause someone else to suffer such a serious injury?

The dog owner has "luckily" escaped punishment this time, but the case is far from "being closed." It calls for our deeper thoughts on how everyone can be deterred from and held responsible for doing harm to others.

A moral reprimand is necessary, but we should also avail ourselves of relevant regulations that bite.