My foot caught in the door of a Beijing bus was my worst! Elbows, backpacks and friends help you to protect the line order - sometimes. However many foreigners are beginning to practice the "When in Rome..." mentality and are joining in the queue jumping exploits.

Keep your cool man! Life is like this with 1.3b.

Once I had a girl slide in front of me in a watson's line when I was the SOLE person in line. I Said "HEY!" And stared at her and she stepped aside and I checked out my things, the whole time I stared her down, she wouldn't look up.

As with Nevermind - practice staring them down, or learn a couple of phrases (which I've yet to do), such as "I thought China was a CIVILISED country", or "Why are people here SO RUDE??"

When I was at a train-station, with a few hundred people all pushing to go up the one elevator to the platform, I yelled out "HAIZIMEN! Man mandian!!!" (or, "Children - slow down" - it had an effect )

With the bus thing, well, I have waited until the third bus came, I finally got in the bus...
Yeah, if u have time, then wait...

When people cut in line in front of me I say loudly no and point them away...they understand.
When they try to push into an elevator before I get out I use my size and just push them back until I get out. I don't think they care about etiquette, but they do get intimidated. I regularly call pushy Chinese men dumb f**ks, but I am sure they have no clue what I am saying. The men here are by far the worst.

Even the foreingers get "infected". Once I was in the school bus, and the FIRST nanosecond it came to a stop, tehre was a line of people standing in the aisle to get off. Not moving at all. On the second nanosecond the other foreign teacher starts smacking my arm telling me to "move it". When i asked whats the rush, after all the line is not even moving, he just got up and stepped over me, pushed one of the chinese teachers back and stuck in line.  Out of curiosity, i timed how long before the line moved: 42 seconds.

A couple of days ago, the bus came. There were about 6 or 7 of us waiting for it, and I looked on the bus, and there was only ONE person on board (and the driver). This loser, who came last to the bus stop, tried to push his way in front of me... he lost! And knew why I didn't appreciate his efforts...

For me, the worst offenders have been little old ladies.  Several times I have been physically elbowed in the gut by old aunties trying to get on the escalator in front of me.  Once I made a comment to one of them and she actually turned her 5'nothing body to me and flipped me off.  She must have been 80.  I couldn't help myself from laughing for the next 10 minutes.

A bus picks my wife and about 20 coworkers up every morning at 6am to bring them to work. I decided to walk her to the stop on my first morning here as I arrived from holidays in Canada and had yet to witness this debacle for myself. We got there and true to form people seemed to materialize out of nowhere. In about 10 minutes the bus could be seen in the distance. The coworkers..and my wife started to slowly make their off the sidewalk and onto the street in anticipation of the bus's pending arrival. When it arrived my wife (she is small) was pushed and shut away from the bus door by the group of mostly men and I was furious. Since they worked together, I assumed they would be cordial. They pushed her aside like a bag of garbage. She didnt get a seat that day as she called me from the bus to say she was standing for the duration of the 2 hour trip.

The next morning was a different story. The bus came that morning true to form but this time I held my wife in front of me and pushed the guys as hard as I had to so she could get on the bus and get a seat untouched.  None of them raised their heads and looked at me even though I was rather rough with them. I have went with her every morning since that day and although there have been no problems since, I am sure I will have to burst into action again soon.

On the Beijing subway in the mornings after getting off the train, I will wait and it will take less than 1 minute for the 'elevator frenzy' to end - works for me.

But the way people push sometimes you'd think there was a pot of gold at the top!