I didn’t tell you, but I got caught by the teachers last night speaking English. That means that my grade is going to drop from a solid a to a meager B. Then, this morning I ran over to Wes’ room to get the laundry soap and a teacher heard me speaking English again. That means that I’m out of here. I have a few days to pack up my stuff, but I’m going to be back home in a few days. I can’t say that I’m that sad about getting kicked out, as that means that I’m going to get to see Morgan earlier… But that also means that I don’t get any credit for this semester, at all. I’m going to need to go to summer school or something, maybe even have to spend another semester at Ole Miss in the fall… I can’t be too mad at the program, I guess.
April Fool’s.
I must say that I haven’t completely given up on studying for the test. After waking up, I spent a sleepy five minutes looking over the study guide, and then I took a shower. It would be the last shower that I took in the dorm for a long time. Why, you ask? I’m building the suspense. But wait.
As I walked to class this morning, I noticed something. Spring has arrived in Beijing, almost overnight. There are blossoms and leaves on the trees (some of them), and a strange neon color to the greenery, further exacerbated by the grayish smog covering the city. It is surprising that everything has decided to bloom today, as the weather is actually comparatively chilly. It is the first day of April, however, and the trees must bloom sometime.
For breakfast, I intended upon eating at the No 5 Café, perhaps getting some eggs easy over, jelly sandwiches, and some dumplings, eaten with a nice warm class of soybean juice. Delicious. That dream wasn’t to be realized. No 5 Café is closed for maintenance for the next three days. I’ll have to get food elsewhere for the next few days, I thought. My plans for the future did little to solve my present situation, and I went hungry for the morning test.
After finishing the test, I walked down to the dumpling shack to see how Li and the crew was faring. As soon as I walked in, Li said, the police came.
Wow! I’m sorry. What happened?
He held out his hand – 5.
Five what?
That’s how much they wanted, he said, 5,000 Yuan.
Holy cow! Are you all right? How is your shop?
I’m fine. It’s just money, right? I can make more money, but if I don’t pay up and give them the bribe, I lose my shop. If that happens, I have no way to make more money. The police aren’t going to demolish my shop. When they came by, all they wanted was a little extra money to eat on, just a little bribe.
I admired his resolution, and the situation got me thinking. Li accepts this situation as normal. Either he does not realize that there is another way of conducting business, not living in fear of having your property confiscated by the police (which is likely when taking into consideration the Great Firewall of China), or he does realize that there is an alternative, but believes that a situation in which people have property rights is unattainable in China. At least for now. Either option is a little disheartening. And a bribe of 5,000 Yuan is no small sum for a shop owner like Li. 5,000 Yuan is about $780, and that is approximately what Li would make in two to three months of business, after production costs.
This phenomenon is not restricted to this section of town either; shop owners all over the city are being milked by the police. It isn’t very difficult to find the people that couldn’t pay up. Look in the cracks of the plywood covering storefronts around the city and take a look at the empty rooms. According to Li, when the police come to collect their bribe, they bring a flatbed truck in tow. If you don’t acquiesce to their bribery, they take your tables, cooking gear, goods, everything on the spot. As if on cue, their neighbor ran over, toothbrush in hand, and said that the police were coming this way. She looked rather distraught. She ran back over to her side, and Li and I looked out the front of the store. Sure enough, there was police truck rolling slowly down the street, emblem reading “Carrying out the laws of Beijing” on the front. A blue flatbed truck followed behind. Li nodded in the direction of his neighbor and said “she can’t pay up. She has no way.”
I imagine that some of you reading this will say, “I’m sure that those people aren’t paying taxes anyway. Those shop owners shouldhave to pay their taxes, and what the police are doing is, in reality, no different from collecting taxes normally, barring that they are paying them all at once.” I agree with this, and the shop owners, if they are going to do business in Beijing, do need to pay their taxes.
However, I there are w a few things that make that rather difficult to do, and these are the primary reasons that I oppose these actions of the police. The act if paying taxes should entitle the storeowners to some public goods provided by the city. There are a number of non-excludable public goods that they do have access to – roads, public restrooms, national security, etc – but beyond these non-excludable goods, these shop owners enjoy no other public goods. According to Chinese law, these shop owners (nearly all of them come from other parts of the country) are not even supposed to be living in Beijing. There still exists a system of registration in your hometown, and Li and his family is still registered in their home province. Any public benefits that they would have received – public healthcare, schooling for their children – are to be gotten back home, not in Beijing. However, the system of public goods outside the large cities is lacking, to say the least, and any benefit that Li would get from paying taxes back home would be dwarfed by the lack of economic opportunity back home. They are essentially non-people in Beijing, in the eyes of the government. China needs migrant workers and shop owners like Li to develop the city, but they are expendable.
Secondly, when the police come to each and every shop in Beijing owned by migrant workers and demands $780, that money is not going to public coffers. That money is padding the pockets of policemen and government officials all over the city, feeding into a giant web of corruption and bribery in the city. The amount of money that has changed hands over the last week is mind numbing, and no one has lifted a finger to oppose the police. Mei ban fa. There is nothing to be done.
Exacerbating the situation is the fact that individuals do not own property in Beijing. Everything is part of the giant state apparatus, and everything is available for confiscation. Would you like to know why Chinese cities look so appealing? Why everything sits balanced, perfectly ordered, in harmony with the surroundings? Because the government can take any property that they see fit to make their own dream cities all over China. Li doesn’t even have a basis for opposing the actions of the police, even if he wanted to.
Granted, the property is worth more than the value of a dumpling shack. Besides being the cultural and political center of China, Beijing is quickly becoming a business hub for China. The business hub of Beijing is a brainchild of the CCP. This area has never been conducive to business, and attempting to transform Beijing into a business center is a rather unnatural turn for this city. I am sure that transforming Beijing into this business hub has accelerated the destruction of hutongs and other historical sections of the city.
That raises the question: why not just condemn these little shops, demolish them, and sell the property to some large Chinese or international firm? My theory is that there is always a bigger fish on the bribery totem pole. As long as the police keep milking their shop owners for some cash every now and then, and nobody squeals – not that they have anyone to squeal to – they can keep their 5,000 Yuan from every shop owner. However, the act of selling a piece of property involves the upper levels of Chinese bureaucracy, and that means that the police don’t collect any more funds. The upper-level government officials will collect their fill, leaving the little fish out to dry. This keeps the ground-level police from doing anything brash to shop owners, and they stay under the radar of the government.
Our class was scheduled to meet on the first floor of the dorm at 10:30, and I rode back to the dorm in the strange half-light of smog and clouds over the city. We were to travel over to the Lu Xun Museum, inside Second Ring Road and in the middle of a hutong I like to visit. I was excited about going to the Lu Xun Museum, and I really do admire his work. However, I had way more to think about, with what just happened with Li. I was in no mood for walking around with our teachers, ignorant to everything going on in this city but the state of our Chinese and the price of Nestle Coffee.
Lu Xun: He was born in 1881 in the backside of nowhere in China. His grandfather was a government official, and like all government officials in China, he took a few bribes on the side. However, at this point in time, the government was a little stricter on bribery than they are now. Lu Xun’s grandfather was found out and everything of value in their household was confiscated by the government. How’s that for justice? Shortly after that, his father and grandfather would both pass away, leaving Lu Xun as the breadwinner of the family. His family moved to Shanghai while he was in his teens, and there he went to school before traveling to Japan to study medicine. There, he realized that he would rather write, and began writing articles, books, essays, and poetry condemning the backwards ways of the Chinese people and exhorting them to do better. He is known as being one of the most prominent modern Chinese writers, and I admire his finesse in the writing sphere. He successfully navigated through the turmoil of the early 1940s, enjoying support from both of the contesting political parties in China – the Nationalists and the Communists.
After that, we went to the Chinese Table with the teachers. We floundered about looking for a place to eat for Chinese Table for some time, and it was quite obvious that they had no idea what was going on… Eventually, we settled on a rather expensive a noodle restaurant, and I dined with Joy, Katie, and Eric.
When I got back to the dorm, I had an email from the program. Someone had been caught cheating on the test this morning, and they wanted to have a meeting at 5:30 to talk about academic honesty. Oh crap. What was going to happen? Was someone getting kicked out?
I rode over to Bally, laughing as a rode. It was raining for the first time in 3 months! I ran long, wishing that I could run outside. I’m not going to try that, though.
I rode straight over to the meeting. After listening to one of the teachers criticize us for our dishonesty and for not keeping the language pledge, Trevor and two other students busted in the room carry three crates of Qingdao beer. April fools! I have to say, it was pretty good.
I came back up to the dorm to write.
I made contact with Wes and Hannah. They had a friend coming to town tonight, and they asked me if I’d like to meet them at hot pot. Most assuredly!
We rode back to the dorm, and then stepped over to a party that my neighbors, James and Trevor, were throwing with the rest of the beer from the April Fool’s prank.
I played Majiang with Wes, Hannah, and their friend for a little while, and then it was time for me to get some sleep.
I’ll write soon!
Love,
Jamey
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