Chopstick tax difficult to digest

Don Lee Los Angeles Times Mar. 25, 2006 12:00 AM

SHANGHAI, China - Is China at a fork in the road?

Beijing this week slapped a 5 percent tax on chopsticks, dealing what many Chinese say was a powerful gut punch. In cafes here, people dropped their chopsticks and spewed out a mouthful against the new tax. Some said it could splinter a 5,000-year-old tradition.

"I think it's ridiculous," advertising executive Gordon Wu said during lunch at a central Shanghai restaurant, where he had just snapped apart two 8-inch splints of shaved wood to eat a bowl of pork over rice.

The tax won't drain many pocketbooks here: A penny buys bunches of chopsticks. That's why the government thinks it's a good way to save the nation's vanishing forests - one chopstick at a time.

China carves up about 45 billion pairs of chopsticks a year. It means certain death for about 25 million full-grown poplar and birch trees.

That's why environmentalists love the tax.

"How many trees will we cut just for chopsticks?" asked Liang Congjie, who carries his personal chopsticks with him so that he doesn't have to use disposable ones.

Other Asian nations have whittled away at the problem in other ways. South Korea ordered many restaurants to stop using disposable wooden chopsticks. They switched to metal ones. Japan now imports them from China.

Over the years, the Chinese have vigorously defended attacks on chopsticks, like when Western researchers claimed chopstick use causes arthritis. But a state-owned newspaper, which blamed runaway chopstick production on China's growing wealth, recently suggested that the Chinese turn their fingers into chopsticks and eat with their hands.

In fact, the government also went after those born with silver spoons in their mouths, levying even heftier taxes on owners of yachts and of bigger sticks: golf clubs.

All this was food for thought on Chinese Internet chat rooms. One person asked: "What's next? Will I have to pay a tax for toothpicks?"