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Bags through the scanner
Every metro station in China screens you on the way in: bags through an X-ray machine, sometimes a wand, occasionally a request to sip from your own water bottle. It is quick, universal and entirely unremarkable — nobody treats it as an event — but it means allowing an extra minute or two, and at rush hour the lines form at the scanner rather than the turnstile. The systems themselves are vast and new: several Chinese cities have metro networks longer than any in Europe or the Americas.