Time to help build an environment which has no place for tuos

My wife recently showed me a message in the WeChat group of our neighborhood in Sanya, Hainan province, inviting residents interested in visiting a real estate sales center to enjoy free coffee and cakes. "Come and do nothing else but enjoy yourself at the center for one hour or so and each of you will be paid 35 yuan ($4.77)," the message said.

We moved our eyes from the message, looked at each other and exclaimed in unison: "So they are hiring a tuo."

In Putonghua, the character tuo means a wooden or metal tray or plate used to carry tea cups or other drinks and foodstuff. Nowadays it is more often used to describe people who help clients to cheat others for a commission. In the case of the sales center, it apparently had hired a tuo to give potential buyers an impression that sales are booming with many people waiting to sign contracts. But its real purpose is to instill in potential buyers a sense of urgency, pushing them to open their wallets.

When you want to find a life partner and pay a few thousand yuan to a matchmaking agent, the latter promises to arrange for you appointments with a number of women or men based on your requirements. In the next few weeks, you might be busy chatting in coffee shops with your dream date and possible life partner, without realizing that all of the people you meet might be part of a tuo. We call such groups of people hun tuo, or marriage tuo. They work for a commission and can always find a good excuse to bid goodbye to you. At the end of the day, you might find yourself cheated out of a big amount of money.

While waiting in a hospital to see a doctor, you might be approached by a person, or some persons, who might tell you how efficient a particular doctor in a certain hospital is in curing the kind of disease troubling you. After you seek his or her help to get an appointment with the said doctor, he or she might reluctantly lead you to the doctor or the hospital. After collecting his/her commission behind you, the person will vanish, leaving you in the hands of an unprofessional doctor in a poorly equipped hospital. We call such people yi tuo, or medical tuo.

Or take a vegetable market. You might find a shop flocked by a group of people, busy "buying" vegetables. They might be talking to each other loudly, saying the vegetables in the shop are not only fresh but also organic. What a good bargain, you might think, to get organic vegetables by paying just a bit more than the price of normal vegetables. If you stay a bit longer in the market, you would see the same group of people "buying" vegetables in the same shop through the day. "They are tuo and the vegetables are not organic at all," the neighboring shop owners might tell you.

The disgusting culture of tuo is now clothed in a modern outfit. Since a lot of contests are held online, viewers' comments play a decisive role in the results. While the contest is on, you might receive a link sent by some relative or colleague, asking you to vote for a certain candidate. You might vote for the candidate thinking you are helping your relative or colleague without even reading or watching the content of the message and end up becoming a tuo yourself.

Simply put, tuos are cheats. Tuo culture survives, rather continues to expand, because many people don't consider their activities as criminal. They hate tuos but might think they are smart enough to avoid being cheated by a tuo.

People who work as tuo, full time or part time, might think their actions are a minor legal offence. And since they can change from tuo to regular consumers or warmhearted citizens instantly, there is little chance of them being caught and punished.

Given the existing circumstances, we should be on high alert against such cheats and help build a social environment in which tuos have no place.

The author is former deputy editor-in-chief of China Daily.