Wednesday, November 28, 2007

Building Cities

Everyday I look out the window of my office and watch hundreds of ants constructing massive structure's of cement and steel and operating large yellow cranes - 17 of them on a clear day. The migrant worker is a vital part of Beijing life considering he builds everything I work, sleep, and eat in. It is estimated that the number of men wearing hard hats in Beijing amounts to the population of Philadelphia.

Most of these men want to help their families by finding higher paying jobs in the cities. I'm not sure how much training they go through to become a construction worker but it is my impression that they jump right into the mix (I suppose that's why Chinese buildings age faster than those built by professionals in the US). These men, usually living and eating in small temporary shacks on site, possess weathered faces, perpetually dirty clothing, warn-down shoes (never work boots), curious eyes, and of course the most distinguishing feature, a yellow hard hat (without that, they would just look like poor rural folk casually strolling Financial Street). Although migrant workers are putting up hundreds of buildings at once, because of their long work hours (Two 12 hour shifts sometimes) and their secluded housing, I have had very little normal interaction with them. Sometimes late at night, I'll be walking along a newly erected apartment complex and I'll run into two to three hundred of them strolling back to the canteen - and most are awed by my height considering most of them have the frame of a teenage girl.

The Hollywood true story behind these worker ants is that they are often abused by their contractors who can withhold money and cut certain national holidays short. The concept of labor unions is surprisingly making its way into places like Wal Mart (unlike the US) but it will be a long time before the migrant worker will receive these rights. One, because they are unaware that such rights should exist and two, China has nearly a billion rural workers waiting in line for a chance to make the big city salary. How much is a big city salary to them? With room and board paid for, about 1500 yuan or 200 US dollars..... every three months. Most of this money is sent home, and they continue to build, build, build.

But where they lack in intellect and modern thought, they make up for in courage and hard work. They should be admired and not looked down upon, for they are building a future for China with nothing but the break of their backs and the sweat of their brow (or something like that). When I think of the development of the American city, I always have that picture of those men sitting on the steel frame of the Empire State Building. Clearly, photography has become more advanced since then, but I challenge Chinese photographers to capture such an image that will help define this era of struggle and progress for future generations.

Even if its from a camera phone

Tuesday, November 27, 2007

Black Market Visa

Its that time again. Every 6 six months or so I have to go through the dilemma of prolonging my stay in China through the acquisition of a black market visa. It's not as sketchy as it sounds. Your visa and the means of getting one has always been an interesting issue among expats living here. The following is an account of a person named "I' and this person can be anybody.

When first coming to China, I was issued a tourist visa and later on was given a student visa by my university which was all gravy until I accidentally overstayed my welcome by a few days. I spent a few minutes in a small room at the airport while two immigration officers bickered over what to do with me . Just when I thought I was going to miss my flight to London, they said zou ba, get out of here - and I had to sprint to the gate.

The second time I came to China I was only given a 30 day tourist visa from the consulate in New York. I was initially upset considering that I had plans to stay the whole summer in Beijing. However, I quickly learned that they had stopped giving 3 month visas to people who had already been to China, but once in China I could extend my tourist visa twice, 30 days each time. The catch was that I needed to show proof of residence at a hotel, school, or organization when applying for each extension. At that time, I was living at my girlfriends while interning at an investment bank and tutoring English on the side. So I had to come up with a plan.

The first solution was no stay at the Friendship Hotel, a famous complex known for its historically beautiful interior courtyards and spacious units (most hotels in China are not one building but a small campus surrounded by walls). Although it was only a block from where I was living, this romantic getaway provided me with the necessary residence papers. My second extension involved going to Tianjin to receive assistance from a friend of my girlfriends who happens to own a factory. The papers where in order, my extension was granted, and we made a night of it on Tianjin's jiuba jie, bar street.

And for the past year, I have been obtaining 6 month business visa's through a local consultant that has connections with government visa offices in the more corrupt interior provinces. I pay twice as much, but without the proper paperwork, I really have no other choice. This type of black market visa has become very popular among the foreigners here and has helped many of us save an expense trip to Hong Kong or Macau, where most used to obtain new visa's or extensions.

Now, depending on my future plans, I have the option of buying a working visa next time around. This deal would be more expensive considering it would last one year and there would be no complications with a formal company (a legit working visa is tied to your company, so if you quit, your screwed). With the Olympics coming up, the visa department I'm sure will cook up new policies making it more and more difficult to extend visas and as local corruption's ugly head continues to get smashed by the central government, the black market will go further underground. However, in China, as long as there is profit in it for someone, there will always be a way. "I' is not worried.

Thursday, November 22, 2007

Thanksgiving in China

This is the second year now that I have eaten Thanksgiving dinner at a Korean BBQ restuarant. This year I was simply treating two of my students while teaching them English. Last year was a bit more memorable in the sense that I was with a larger group including most of my closest friends in Beijing. There were 3 Koreans, 3 Iclelanders, and 3 Amercians. We were from all different parts of the world and had met eachother in Beijing. Korean bbq, a popular style of Korean cuisine in our corner of Beijing, involves roasting slices of pork or beef on a burner built into the table and then rolling up the cooked meat along with rice and spices in leaves of lettuce. But more importantly, bbq is more often than not accompanied by Soju, Korean rice wine. On that particular Thanksgiving night, every member of the table stood up to make a toast about what they were thankful for, and then everybody sitting at the table would ganbei, empty their shot glasses. After 9 toasts everyone was feeling quite good.

Most of these buddies of mine have already returned to their home countries for further study or a better job. So this year, my girlfriend and I decided to have a relaxing and quiet home cooked Thanksgiving dinner on Wednesday night - I love her cooking. There was no turkey (a very expensive meat imported from the US) but she had cooked mashed potatoes ... made by hand. Everything was delicious and I was stuffed like one should be on Thanksgiving - but like most American traditonal holidays I've spent abroad, it lacked the essence, which I have come to realize is family.

Wednesday, November 21, 2007

A Civilizing Society

Whilst walking around downtown Beijing last weekend, I was approached by a volunteer from the People's University (considered Beijing's #3 school). She was conducting a survey on behalf of the government in order to collect different viewpoints from expats concerning the lack of "civilized behavior and common courtesy" in Beijing . This is a hopeful sign. Like any good rehabilitation program, admitting that you have a problem is the first step. Unfortunately, Beijing has been on step one for a long time now.

Its not like the government isn't trying either. They have blanketed the city with billboards, posters, and TV commercials advocating wenming (civility) and advising citizens on what is socially unacceptable. In the buses and subways , loud monitors endlessly play propaganda geared towards creating what they call a harmonious society. Even when I stand in front of urinals, I often practice my Chinese by reading rhymes on the wall that translate into "Its a small step forward for you, but a large step forward for civility." Every time I go into a restroom in Beijing, I feel like I have just been to the moon. However, it seems that Beijing's laobaixing, or common person is just to damn resilient. I love Beijing in so many ways but if Beijingers could improve in 3 basic areas, the quality of life and the attractiveness of this city could skyrocket up.

One, no discharging of any fluids or bodily waste in public places. This one is a no brainer and a civilization that wants to be taken seriously should not act like their pets. This means no spitting (I very very common habit among Chinese people), no loogeys, no snot rockets, no urinating, no excreting, no ejaculating (an unrepeatable story), no cutting fingernails in restaurants, no picking at ear wax, and no holding babies out so they can pee out large slits in their pants. If I was a betting man, the person that brings affordable and environmentally friendly diapers to China will become extremely rich.

Two, be courteous to your fellow citizen and respect the need for order. Please let people off the subway, bus, and elevator before getting on - everyday I get smacked, elbowed, or pushed on my way to work. I understand that Beijing is crowded and that there are many people going in all directions at once, but common courtesy is essential to sustain an enjoyable and orderly existence among millions of people. I long for the day to see people waiting in lines at the ticket counter at the Beijing railway station, not lighting cigarettes on the way up escalators at subway stations, and, god forbid, acting to help someone else. During Mao's Communist rule, the Chinese people were often condemned for helping the wrong people or put under suspicion for even expressing reasonable human compassion for the well-being of a suspected rightist. It seems that even three decades later, people are still scared to help strangers and still take part in cowardly behavior. I can't tell you how many times I've seen a beating or someone fall off their motorcycle while a crowd of curious spectators surround the scene yet fail to be of any assistance. They would sooner let a cyclist bleed to death or let a poor beggar get beaten to a pulp before intervening. Unfortunately, heroism is not a common trait obtained by those living in socially oppressive regimes that stifle individual thought and action.

Three, oh boy, how I could talk forever about this one - Road Etiquette. Here is a short list of no-nos that Chinese drivers should try to remember: Don't run through red lights, Don't turn off your headlights at night to save electricity, Don't speed down the bike lanes, Don't block the box, Don't switch lanes without signalling, Don't try passing long lines of traffic in the middle of the city, Don't honk your horn at everything you see, Don't cut other cars off, and Don't stop in the middle of the highway because of a little fender bender (I have recently learned that insurance companies need a cop to see the exact scene of the accident no write a valid report - how crazy is that) . Anybody who has been to Beijing knows that the driving skills are lacking and that the main reason for bad traffic is not because there are roughly 3.5 million drivers in the city (of course less would be bettter), but because more than half of these drivers do not abide by the rules of the road. Imagine New York, but every driver is 16 and drunk and driving an loud swirving ambulance... that's what it looks like on some streets in Beijing. The lack of driving experience (since many just started driving recently) and traffic citations (I have never seen anybody get pulled overed) in Beijing are the main reasons traffic is often at a crawl, regardless of what time of day it is. The DMV in Beijing must instate mandatory drivers Ed and the traffic police need to do more than stand in the middle of intersections, yelling at pedestrians for not yielding to cars even when they have the right of way. The whole system is a mess, and everybody knows it, but without more education and stiffer enforcement of the rules, Beijing traffic is doomed.


I am sure that if the citizens of Beijing and the forces that be focused on these 3 vital areas of "civility" before the Olympics, the whole world will be pleased to see how far China has come not just as an economy but also as a society, otherwise Beijingers will leave a lasting impression off barbarianism in the millions of visitors expected to attend in 2008.

Friday, November 16, 2007

Inflation Causes Heart-burn

It seems not long ago when I first arrived in Beijing that Heineken was only a dollar and a crosstown taxi ride was nothing but chump change - now I only drink domestic beer and I take public transportation every day. Certainly, times have changed and so have the prices.

Is China overheating? I don't think so - no yet at least. But I do believe that the Chinese economy will see more volatility in the coming year. Inflation has soared for the past 6 months at rates the new economy is not used to. The rising prices in real estate has created such a bubble and that in the event of a burst, the effects would be far more detrimental than those felt by American home-owners this past summer. The price of pork (a staple meat in China) and eggs has continued to double and then triple, creating panic among China's low-income rural population. Just this past Saturday in Chongqing, people began lining up before dawn when a Carrefour store offered a discount on large jugs of cooking oil, an essential for a lot of Chinese cooking. When the doors opened, a stampede ensued, killing 3 people and injuring 31.

As farmland continues to disappear and Ministry of Health inspectors preventing the spread of disease wipe out hundreds of thousands of pigs and chickens (blue-ear disease and bird flu), China will have to come to terms with its rising food pricing, while the government tries to curb foreign investment, hike up interest rates and buy about 1 billion dollars in in foreign currency (mostly US dollars) a day.

Rising inflation, however, already has had some effects. China's banks pay a one-year savings rate of 3.87 percent - far less than the inflation rate - and some savers have withdrawn money from banks to buy real estate and invest in the stock market, which has almost doubled so far this year, despite a major correction recently.

Personally I am not worried about the rising food prices (even though I shop at Carrefour) - I'm more concerned about the prospect that the rising mass of savings in China's economy may soon boost housing and other costs, thus setting itself up for a hard landing that would ultimately shake the world's economy like never before.

Wednesday, November 14, 2007

Chinese Poker

So it looks like I was right. Last week my father was visiting and this week I have started a new job. It's amazing that I even have time or energy to right this brief article. Travelling to all four corners of the city with my old man allowed me to revisit places and emotions that for some time now were but faint memories in the back of my mind - and of course I was given completely new experiences as well.

One new experience I want to recall is my third time visiting the Temple of Heaven. At this famous ancient attraction in Southern Beijing (twice the area of the Forbidden City), thousands of tourists stroll through the expansive parks, take photographs of beautiful spiral temples, try to hear their own echo when standing next to a massive circular wall, and spend around 10 seconds standing on a stone that supposedly gives you the power to directly communicate with the heavens. The history of annual animal sacrifice and the divine power exercised by China's emperors is fascinating and unsurprisingly the architecture and amount of open space is impressive, but by far the most memorable part of the Temple of Heaven is the long corridor.

At this long corridor, hundreds of elderly men and women sit on wide wooden railings on both sides of this outside corridor (some bring their own chairs) while they play cards, gossip, sing songs, play musical instruments, play Chinese chess, and sometimes get up to do a few exercises. I must have walked past a few dozen consecutive groups playing Chinese poker (a more entertaining way to play poker in my opinion). The atmosphere was simply amazing. Their is something surreal about being in the presence of hundreds of active and cheerful Chinese senior citizens when you try to imagine the crazy lives they must have lived. If they were born the same year as my Dad, they would have lived through the Japanese invasion and Nanjing massacres, a Nationalist police state, a civil war, Communist takeover, abusive anti-rightist movements, a catastrophic famine, the cultural revolution, Dengs reforms of 1979, the opening of China, the acceptance into the WTO, over a decade of double digit economic growth and soon they will witness the first Olympics ever to be held in China.

I read books and talk to those willing to story tell, but I will never fully understand what they have been through. Of those at the Temple of Heaven many were still robust and their faces were full of color, but their eyes wouldn't lie to me - they have seen the worse of China and then the best of China - and although they have been dealt terrible cards for a better half of a century, they are watching their luck, and those of their families, quickly changing.

Sunday, November 4, 2007

Loads To Talk About

Being an English tutor, I am able to discuss an array of interesting topics with all types of professionals - university professors, lawyers, scientists, bankers, computer engineers. And it is through these conversations that I collect a great deal of information concerning the rationale and thought processes of those who benefited under Deng Xiaoping's reforms. Only in the last couple of decades have Chinese started feeling comfortable enough to express their own opinions about sensitive issues. Of course, I won't see any of them acting on these feelings nor openly debating them on the subway, but ever since China stopped holding denouncement sessions, labelling people as rightists, and throwing low-profile citizens under suspicion in jail or into labor camps, the people have felt a new sense of freedom.


Yesterday alone I had lively conversations about space exploration, bisexuals, snake eating, state vs. private employees, evolution vs. religion, mutual funds, and how Chinese drink alcohol.

I have already cross checked these views with other references, and this is what I've gathered: A good portion of the intellectual population questions whether the US actually landed on the moon. Homosexuality and bisexuality are considered a "mental disease" and "disgusting" and bisexuals do not possess infidelity because they play on both teams. Guangdong people will eat anything including snakes. Many parents working in state-run enterprises and institutions hope their children end up in the private sector. Chinese schools teach evolution and believe religion is a distraction to scientific discovery. Mutual funds are probably a better bet than real estate, since many predict the bubble will burst after the Olympics. And Chinese men usually only drink beer and baijiu (strong rice vodka) and they drink at a restaurant, not a bar.

These discoveries often lead to more questions and eventually a very comprehensive discussion on what is taking place in China and in the minds of the Chinese. One of the reasons I started a blog was to record and share some of these findings. I may be extremely busy in the coming weeks, but I'll try to be as diligent as possible - I have no doubt that every time I sit down in front of the computer, I will have loads to talk about.

Friday, November 2, 2007

Its All About The Maos (not Benjamins)

I have a savings account in an American bank and have been converting my income from RMB into dollars (usually on the black market) to occasionally send home and deposit. I did a few minutes of personal accounting today, and I realized that I could have made huge gains if all of my money was still in Chinese RMB. Since I arrived the exchange rate has changed from 8 RMB a dollar to 7.5 RMB a dollar - that's huge. From now on, I am putting all of my salary into the Bank of China, and putting my future into one of the world's most unstable banking systems -- yikkes!

Thursday, November 1, 2007

Yao & Yi

While living in Beijing, I have had to learn to watch certain sports I wasn't grown up on. When residing outside the US in general, one should watch and know soccer (and call it football). If you want to be included in bar conversation about sports with your European friends, you need to at least know the best teams in the Premier League and follow the European Cup. But soccer aside, these last few months of tuning in on CCTV 5 (China's lame version of ESPN) have been extremely educational for me. I have watched countless volleyball matches, ping pong matches, badminton matches, weightlifting competitions, and I am sure at some point I will succumb to watching snooker.

So you can imagine my excitement now that the basketball season has started. China has a less competitive CNBA league which is not very entertaining, but NBA games are shown regularly especially those that include the Houston Rockets (Yao Ming) or the newly accepted Minneapolis Bucks (Yi Jianlian). China is simply crazy about this sport and it has been reported that around 300 million Chinese play basketball in their free time - that's the whole population of the US. So its not hard to understand why the NBA has invested millions of dollars in developing a market that may one day overtake the US. Drafting Chinese stars like Yao or Yi means big money for any franchise and so it's not uncommon to hear that someone like Phil Jackson or Joe Torre is in town - that's right, the Yankee empire is looking to East to help deliver retribution next season.