Bad China Days

Tuesday, July 27th, 2010 in: News, Travel

Everyone has them. They’re the days when nothing seems to go your way, and the only comfort you can seek is that you’re stuck trying to get things done in China. Everyone has a slightly different way of expressing it, but I prefer to just call them “Bad China Days.”

I’ve been forced to use this term several times in the past couple weeks, in order to keep my composure in the face of downright impotent Chinese bureaucracy. I’ve come to the following conclusion about guanxi (connections) in China: It’s vaguely reminiscent of Japanese uchi and soto, but it’s not just a social construct, it actually helps determine how quickly you can get things done. It takes a certain length of time to do things if you’re on your own, but if you know someone who can grease the wheels for you, it’s “meiwenti,” no problem. During my time with Grandpa, I was under Ben’s care. Well-enough connected in the travel industry, and at least aware of how to get things done, Ben made it seem effortless to maneuver through the countryside. I’m sure it would have been a different story had I tried to do this on my own. In fact, I was thinking about doing some of this on my own later so I’ll be able to compare experiences.

When I first came to Wuhan, I was confronted with the cruel reality that my ATM card wouldn’t work in China for whatever reason. I had to withdraw cash using my credit card, requiring me to wait to see a teller and present my passport. I withdrew 3000 RMB (less than $500) and later got stuck with over $30 in “bank transactions” that couldn’t be disputed, despite the fact that I was never warned of any such fees by the bank. On subsequent visits, I cashed some traveler’s checks I brought with me, but I knew it wasn’t enough to get me through Beijing, so I had my parents make out some more checks and send them with my grandpa. They were 2-person checks, so two people sign them initially and either one can cash them. My dad signed the top and I signed below, but when I took them to the Bank of China, they tried to turn me away, saying they couldn’t cash them. It took half an hour to convince them I didn’t need both signatures to cash them, and another fifteen minutes to convince them I wasn’t going to leave until they exchanged them for me. A common Chinese response to a new problem, it seems, is to try to foist it on someone else, so they tried to tell me they couldn’t cash it at that branch, but if I went to the main branch it would be “meiwenti,” no problem. I had to call them on their bullshit and stand my ground until they hung up the phone to headquarters to happily announce that I could indeed cash them there. Damn straight.

You know the story about my computer, there’s a goldmine of frustration bubbling under the hood of this laptop. My frequent and unfruitful trips to Zhongguancun were an inexhaustible source of Bad China Days, even through my attempts at staying good-natured about the whole fiasco.

Another brief brush with disaster was when the school office asked me for my passport to revise my visa. Since they’d put the wrong dates on my application documents, the consulate in Japan gave me a 60 day visa, which wasn’t even enough to cover my stay in Beijing, let alone the extra travel I had planned. About ten days before my visa expired, they told me they needed my passport to extend my visa. “What’s the latest you can extend my visa to? I want to do some traveling before I leave.” Despite the fact that it made no clerical difference which date they choose to extend it to, it still took some haggling to get them to let me stay longer than a week after the end of classes. I was finally able to squeeze a few extra weeks out of them for the extension, though they made it seem like I was bending the rules big time by doing this.

“OK, give me the original copy of your admission paper.”

“hm, I’m pretty sure the Consulate in Japan took that, they only gave me my passport back when I got my visa.”

“oh, they should have given it back to you.”

“…yeah, but they didn’t…”

“hm, that might be a problem”

So for the rest of the day (while I was carting my broken computer around Zhongguancun looking for a repair shop) I was wondering just how big a problem it might be. Would I have to spend some ridiculous amount for a last-minute flight to Hong Kong to renew my visa outside the country? But then I’d have to reapply for the school and wait two weeks to get a new admission notice, then reapply for the visa. By the time I’m done with all that I’ll practically be out of time in Beijing anyways. What a massive fly in the ointment.

When I got back to the school, they showed me their own original copy of my admission paper, since there were three or four original copies at the time it was issued. “This should work, meiwenti.” All that worrying was for nothing, although I was careful not to relax too much–“should” is a dangerous word around here if you take it too seriously. In the end, it was meiwenti; although it took almost two weeks to get my passport back, it did indeed have the right date on it, and I didn’t have to take any extraneous trips to avoid getting kicked out of the country. Of course, when I got it back, it was missing the little slip of paper immigration gives you when you enter the country that reads something like “If you don’t have this when you leave, it may delay your departure.” Another bridge to cross when I get to it, thanks a bunch, China!

As a good friend often says, “China really shits me sometimes.”

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