Attacking by oblique means and stealthy feints since 2007
Chicago Dan’s American English Daycare put up an advertisement in my neighborhood. Sounds like a pretty nice service for Chinese kids. Especially the part about the foreign teachers being American and white.
The neighborhood I live in was pretty remote before the Line 5 subway was built. Since my building was finished in 2006 or 2007 and the subway line opened in September 2007, it’s safe to say that the building was built in response to the newly available subway. All of which makes it puzzling why the north gate is closed.
Here’s my building:
When I moved in, both the north and east gates were open and in use. At night the north gate was often kept almost closed, so that only pedestrians could fit through and cars had to go through the east gate. Fair enough. But after a couple of years, the north gate was locked shut without warning. I asked the wuye about it and was told that there wasn’t enough money to keep a guard posted there.
Let’s do some math.
I pay approximately 4000 RMB every year in management fees. There are six building entrances, each of which holds 20-24 apartments (two doors on each floor, and 10-12 floors per entrance, depending on the location). So let’s say 136 apartments. That’s 544000 RMB per year from basic fees. There are also at least 100 cars parked inside the gates, covering almost every single inch of available space. Let’s say 300 RMB per month for parking; that brings in another 360000 RMB. So with close to 1 million RMB at their disposal, the wuye have decided it’s out of their budget to assign a skinny 18-year-old kid with a crustache and an oversized shirt to sleep in the guard box at the north gate.
The joy in this story comes not from the stupid decision by the wuye but rather by the sad and predictable effect of that decision. Because unlike me, someone was not content just to complain to everyone who would listen. This guy wanted his north gate back, and he got it back — by bending and removing the metal bars of the gate until he could fit through them. Here’s the gate now:
Even with the makeshift bars tied on, it’s easy to get in and out. There’s no guard there, so whoever was being kept out “for my safety” now has easy access. You couldn’t even open the gate if you tried, and replacing it surely won’t be cheap. All in all, a brilliantly played hand by the building management.
Here are a few more pics. Note the cars parked directly in front of both sides of the gate, as well as the graffiti sprayed right next to the guard post.
This SMS came in at 2:59pm on Monday, May 2:
新闻早晚报快讯：美国总统奥巴马1日表示，美军方当天对巴基斯坦一所建筑发动袭击， 打死了“基地”组织领导本·拉丹，并对其尸体进行了确认。新华社
News Alert: On May 1st, United States President Obama said that earlier in the day U.S. military forces had attacked a building in Pakistan, killing Al Qaeda leader bin Laden and confirming the identity of his corpse. Xinhua News Agency
The sender was 10658000, also known as China Daily Mobile News, a paid service that sends daily news headlines and links to mobile users. I don’t subscribe, but occasionally they’ll send me particularly important updates — usually matters of obvious nationwide concern, such as natural disasters or the latest epidemic sweeping through the capital. I never received any “regular” news like this, though. It was also odd that it arrived over three hours after I had watched Obama’s speech live (or, more likely, almost live) on Chinese TV.
So, why? Here are my top four theories:
Of course, the correct answer is “no why” (不为什么) .
Just received the following call:
Hello, sir, I am calling from the National Olympic Sports Center (国家奥体中心). Do you have any 5 to 16 year old children in your household?
I said no, and he immediately hung up. Now I wish I had kept him on the line a bit longer. If he wasn’t from NOSC (and I don’t think he was), then what was he trying to do? Promote some sports activity for kids? Conduct a survey? Or maybe just identify mobile numbers of parents with kids in that age range?
And what if he was from NOSC? Was he scouting for the next generation of talent? Peter Hessler described China’s national sports recruitment system in the New Yorker piece on Yao Ming a few years ago:
When Yao Ming entered the third grade, he was five-seven, and Shanghai’s Xuhui District Sports School selected him for its after-school basketball program. Recently, I visited Yao’s first coach, Li Zhangming, who, like a traditional Chinese educator, spoke of Yao in completely unsentimental terms (“He didn’t much like basketball. He was tall, but slow and uncoördinated”). After our conversation, I wandered around the basketball courts of Shanghai’s No. 54 Middle School, where the Xuhui Sports School holds some of its practices. I watched a group of young girls performing basketball drills, then introduced myself to the coach, a tall woman named Tao Yanping.
“I was a teammate of Yao’s mother,” Tao said. “I went to their wedding. I remember giving them towels and thermoses—things you gave newlyweds back then. See that girl there?” She pointed out a red-faced child, the tallest on the court. “Her mother was also my teammate. That girl is in the third grade. Her mother is 1.83 metres tall, and she made the national team.”
I asked Tao how she recruited. “We go to the schools and look at the children’s height, and then we check their parents’ height,” she said.
The two-hour practice consisted mostly of ballhandling drills. Tao was attentive, shouting commands at her charges (“Little Swallow, you’re travelling! Who taught you to do that?”). At the end of the practice, tall parents materialized at courtside. Zhang Jianrong, a woman who was nearly six feet tall, told me that basketball was just a healthy activity for her daughter; the girl’s studies were more important. Like the other parents, Zhang was a basketball mom in a country that selects its basketball moms by height.
The method of early recruitment is a product of China’s inability to provide every public school with coaches and sports facilities. The system has proved effective in low-participation, routine-based sports like gymnastics and diving, but when it comes to basketball it may be China’s greatest weakness. In America, where community leagues and school coaches are plentiful, athletes emerge from an enormous pyramid of participants. Some, like Allen Iverson, rise to the top with remarkable passion and creativity—but if a recruiter had shown up at the Iverson home when Allen was in the third grade, he would have found no father and a short mother who had given birth at the age of fifteen. It’s significant that China has yet to produce a great male guard—the position requires skill and intensity rather than height. All three Chinese players in the N.B.A. are centers, and two are second-generation centers. The Chinese national team is notorious for choking in key games, partly because the ballhandling is inconsistent. Players rarely appear to enjoy themselves, and their character has not been formed by true competition; even as free-market reforms have changed many Chinese industries, the sports world is a throwback to socialism, with its careful planning and career stability. Once, when I asked Yao Ming how many Chinese would be in the N.B.A. in a decade, he said only three or four.
This seems more like the Chinese way of doing things, and it matches the anecdotal evidence I’ve heard. So if the call was from NOSC, it would be the first time a telemarketer claimed to be from a government body. I guess that’s why it seems so strange. It’s out of character, and kind of desperate in a way.
Spent some time outside in the wind without a scarf yesterday, then moved around furniture at home for a couple of hours. The pain came on last night, fast, in my neck and left shoulder. It was bad enough to wake me up just from moving around in bed. So tonight I went in and got my first baguanr done:
The whole procedure only took about 15 minutes. Nowhere near as painful as it looks, and it definitely loosened my neck up, though I’m told I’ll have to wait until tomorrow to feel the full effect.
I was watching Inglourious Basterds when the clock struck midnight and the noise peaked. Paused the movie and recorded this.
Li Na lost in three sets to Kim Klijsters in the Australian Open Finals yesterday, and at least part of the blame goes to her own Chinese supporters:
MELBOURNE -Li Na told her coach and husband she would love him “forever” after she lost the Australian Open final Saturday, but she had little love for the “amateur coaches” in the stands who broke her rhythm against Kim Clijsters.
Fed up with boisterous shouts from Chinese fans during the tense second set, ninth seed Li marched to the chair umpire after being broken at 3-3 and asked her: “Can you tell the Chinese, don’t teach me how to play tennis?”
“There were a lot of people coaching me,” she told reporters. “It was really loud and it wasn’t just one direction, it was from all sides.
“I think Chinese people watching tennis can’t be polite … (saying) ‘Take her out!’ and other things.
When they were calling out things it was during returns, so I felt” — and here she inhaled sharply — “so tired!”
The outburst was reminiscent of her moment during her semifinal against Dinara Safina at the 2008 Beijing Olympics, when she told the local crowd to “shut up.”
Flustered by the frenetic atmosphere at Rod Laver Arena, the 28-year-old from the Yangtze river port of Wuhan demanded British umpire Alison Lang order fans to quiet down and railed at flashing cameras as the third set slipped from her fingers.
Unfortunately I didn’t see the match and can’t confirm what exactly the crowd was doing or saying, but still… Obnoxious Chinese fans? Distracting camera flashes? An argumentative Wuhaner? Nothing out of the ordinary there.
Despite her loss, Li’s ranking will rise to a new Chinese record of seven and she is guaranteed a hero’s reception when she returns home, where hundreds of millions tuned in to watch the match live.
I wouldn’t say guaranteed, now that she has made Chinese fans lose face on an internationally televised event. All internet flamers aside, it will be interesting to see the official reaction here. It could be an opportunity to scold Chinese audiences into being more “civilized”, similar to what Beijingers endured in the years preceding the 2008 Olympics. Less likely but still possible is a Wang Zhizhi Situation, in which Li is deemed a “traitor” by the motherland and forced to make a groveling public apology.
The latter is unlikely, as Wang’s was a much more serious offense involving breaking his contract, and it was made against the People’s Liberation Army. For Li, the best case scenario is that they do nothing and just let her play:
I was sorting through some old papers over the weekend and came across the card for Grand Profit International Travel Agency.
I used their services several times, back when it was difficult and expensive to get an F visa in Beijing. The same visa bought in Hong Kong was cheap and easy to get, and I am always up for a trip down to HK. Here’s the price list on the back of the card (from around 2005):
Beijing has become the better option in recent years, as the HK places got more expensive and less reliable. Trader’s Link is probably the best-known agency in Beijing; it’s still expensive, but generally reliable. The only trick now is to time your visa renewal with a China entry, due to the policy of making all F visa holders leave the country once every year, regardless of how much time is left on one’s visa.
I talked to the new manager at Traders Link on my last visit; he said the place is run by the Public Security Bureau. A bit surprising, but it does explain the ever-growing number of meaningless gestures required in the application. (My favorite part of that procedure is having to stand in front of the reception desk as they photograph me with the company logo behind me to prove that I actually came into the office.)
I witnessed my first authentic Chinese fire drill when riding out of my apartment complex this morning. The basic form was the same as I have seen back home: A white Volkswagen Jetta was stopped in the intersection where the street meets the side road of the Third Ring Road. The driver got out, followed by the front seat passenger and then a back seat passenger. Each of them walked around the car and re-entered in a different seat. The car then drove away.
But just like the “Chinese food” in America that bears little resemblance to the wide range of fare available here, a real Chinese drill is a far more nuanced and complex performance in its homeland:
It seems the rest of the world is has barely scratched the surface in terms of understanding this part of Chinese culture.
Whenever you read about the latest corruption case in China, what immediately springs to mind when you think about how the money was spent? I asked ODB, and here’s what he came up with:
Think of your own list, then read this article from from the Wall Street Journal’s China Realtime Report:
On trial is the head of a finance company who stands accused of bribing bank officials in return for more than 700 million yuan, or more than $100 million, in loans for fake mortgages and small businesses, according to Chinese media reports.
The 30-year-old head of the Beijing Huading Credit Security Company, Hu Yi, allegedly paid officials at the Beijing Rural Commercial Bank to help him apply for loans with fake names and businesses from the end of 2007 to February 2009. A total of 18 people are on trial, eight of them senior bank officials.
The official allegedly used the money to gamble in Macau, invest in mines and buy calligraphy and paintings, most of which turned out to be fake, according to the Legal Mirror. Only half of the total 708 embezzled yuan was recovered, the Chinese reports said.
Bonus points if you guessed that the expensive paintings and cultural artifacts were fake.