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Before Swissair collapsed in 2001, one of its most well-known slogans was Time is everything. The Swiss continue to “brainwash” the Chinese as the nation of watches. To me as a Swiss citizen, time plays an extremely important role: persons near and dear to me know the effort I put just to arrive ontime.

To the Swiss, timing is crucial. The Swiss have, indeed, invented a new way of asking the time: “Wie spät isch es?”, or “How late is it?”, is heard much more often than “Do you have the time”? Swiss Federal Railways and Mondaine have come out with a very Swiss clock: the second hand stops for a full second at the twelve o’clock marker before the minute hand moves.

One of the most famous “Swiss timing moments” can be seen at Zurich Main Station. Before the big timetable shakeup in the mid-2000s, there was absolutely always a train at 17:07 bound for south Switzerland on Track 9. The announcement was always made at around 17:06:30 (in two languages no less — German and Italian), and the whistle always blew without fail when the minute hand moved to seven minutes past the hour. Within 15 seconds, the doors would be locked and the train would have left Zurich Main Station.

Were it not for the fact that I hold not just the passport of the Swiss Confederation, but have been literally indoctrinated (time-wise) to be prompt for the best part of 12 years, I would have never learned to stick to a schedule. The Swiss view timing as absolutely crucial — to the extent that the renqing wei’er, or human-ish factor (人情味儿 in Chinese), can sometimes get lost. Recently, though, in part to reduce traffic accidents, the Swiss traffic authorities have come out with the new slogan: Better late for a few minutes than an accident!

And this, indeed, is the sticking point — traffic. While the underground jaguar (that’s the Beijing Subway) runs without a hitch (with Mozart no less — or as that used to be the case), the rest of us, stuck on ground level, are used to seeing more and more of this:

It got to the extent that I, quite literally, brainwashed a Chinese friend (who lived in the US for quite a while) to nix a deal with an incoming guest. The incoming guest wasn’t late by 30 seconds; nope, the guy was late for a full 30 minutes.

For Swiss people, they’re pretty much used to ontime trains, ontime appointments and even ontime trams (I mention this because to stick to a schedule, some Zürich trams will actually slam the doors shut on people rushing to the tram because they’re about a second late). They’re like that because (like me) they’ve planned a whole day out, in order. For the Chinese, though, nothing’s really as well planned as things are in Zürich (I’ve had personal experience in this!), so they often have the tendency to “run late” and are less offended when one delay drags everything else back. Personally, I prefer that everyone arrive ontime (I guess I am Swiss enough to even SMS my girlfriend stuff like “We will meet in 30 minutes; let’s make it ontime today!”), but in the case of delays, I’ve got some “extra time” to let things run a tad late and still make it ontime for the next appointment.

Timing in China is a mad mix. Big corporate bosses, known (fearfully) as the laozongs (老总), don’t give each other hell for being about 15 minutes late. But if a fellow employee comes in just about a minute late, the laozongs can (at times; I’ve heard about this) let rip at will. There goes that extra yuan that would have belonged to the innocent employee if he or she arrived on time.

So how do you find your way around this? Believe it or not (I tried, it worked), the weapon is by SMS text message. Remind people that traffic will be more than ferocious. Remind fellow microphone maniacs that the KTV fiesta is tonight. They will know — and they’ll turn up on time. The last BeiMac meeting and the KTV fest before that started ontime — thanks to good communications by SMS. The point here is to send the SMS as a kind reminder — use language like “Let’s get together ontime” instead of “You must arrive at 15:00!”, so that they’ll want to arrive ontime.

It’s not that the Chinese don’t want to come on time — believe me, they do — but in a place where a thousand new cars hit the road every day… you know, sometimes the math doesn’t really work out.

(Yet. That is, until Beijing is home to 561 kilometers of subway.)

(Hey, can we wait?)