Chris Drumgoole

What? Sorry? You said what??

We’re working yesterday and today - Saturday and Sunday - as next week is one of the three “Golden Weeks” in China.  This one, always in October, is in celebration of the nation’s founding - October 1, sometime in the 1940’s, I forget.  Any way…

“Why on earth are you working during the weekend??” you may be asking me.  That’s a damn good question.  And here’s the answer…

What I have been told, the government mandates these holidays in order to guarantee migrant laborers time off (as these unsung heroes put in ridiculous hours building buildings, roads, cars, electronics, etc.) , oh, and probably so they can have enough time to go home to their far-flung provinces.  They brand these holidays as “Golden Weeks” where you have a full 7 days off in a row.

But here’s the catch.  It’s a sham, you see… 2 of the days we make up either the weekend before of after (or even some times one weekend day before, the other, after the holiday) - this all depends on when the “magic” day falls.  (i.e. October 1, Chinese New Year day, or May 1).  THEN, you can take away two more days as these are covered by an actual weekend.  So in reality, we’re getting 3 free days.

Thanks guys.

Example

This year, October 1 lands on a Monday.  This is an easy example because we just work the Saturday and Sunday before (yesterday and today), and come back to work the following Monday, Oct. 8.

Doing the Math!

O.k., so, 3 “Golden Week” holidays = 3 days each = 9 total days + New Years Day = 10 total government holidays.

That’s average, comparing to other countries.  So why do I complain? Because these guys, the brilliant propaganda B.S. artists that they are, brand these holidays as week long breaks.  Which is a sham, as I’ve already mentioned above.

And boy oh boy… try explaining your customer in the U.S. or anywhere else how these holidays work…  Good Luck!

“Yeah, so, we’re having a holiday next week.  It’s 7 days long, but actually, it’s effectively 3 days because 2 of the days we’re making up during the weekend and 2 of the days are real weekend days.  So, it’s not bad, really…” This doesn’t work too well as they won’t be working those 2 weekend days your making up, so they see it as a full week off.

I’m rambling - sorry.

Concluding this mess

It seems that unfortunately, this attempt at promoting mass harmony amongst the masses (I love redundancy) will continue for many years to come.   This ridiculous system is… ridiculous.  Nobody wants to be at work these days…  People are thinking about their holiday plans.  They’re not thinking about work.  So, efficiencies drop to all-time lows.

Just give us the days - 9 consecutive days off (4 of which are weekends)!  makes sense!  Or, if you must be stingy, give just 5 days (2 of which are weekends) and let people do what they want to do with their vacation.

O.k., o.k… I know…. This is supposed to help the migrant laborers..  WAKE UP!

1. I’m not a migrant worker, nor are my colleagues. So exempt us from this madness!
2. You think these migrant slave drivers actually follow the rules all the time?!   My plan wouldn’t make any difference to what is actually happening.

Thoughts?

Can China focused sites please NOT use feedburner to host your feeds? If you guys haven’t noticed, the feeds.feedburner.com domain is blocked in China.

At least post the original rss feed as well.

I noticed some sites are already doing this.  Thanks guys:

• China Law Blog
• Chinalyst- although they added a stupid alternative feed hosting service.  To bypass, the rss.xml is still valid

Thank you.

Beijing Newspeak wrote their view on the incident I wrote about in my previous post.  I wrote a comment that I have pasted here for convenience:

While no doubt the actions taken by the authorities were over the top and unacceptable (the alleged racial profiling part), I think people should realize that this is how things work here. Good or bad, that’s it. We can’t change it. We can complain all we want, but that won’t change things.

People can avoid putting themselves in these situations. Or even better, those who are wrongfully profiled due to the stereotypes, they could help clean up Sanlitun. “We don’t want drug dealers in our town.”

Possible?

Now, I don’t know if I’d agree with the Newspeak’s title claiming the police are “ignorant” - I hope, and am sure they thought about how to respond to this drug problem.  Taking an action like this with no prior planning/thinking is pretty stupid as it will no doubt create a public issue - no doubt they tried to avoid by forcing the bystanders to delete the photos taken.  It seems this could also create a diplomatic problem with the Grenadian Ambassador’s son.

Of course, TIC.  Maybe they did just decided to round up all the blacks without much thought.  I find that an interesting course of action, though, as Beijing hosted the Sino-African summit last November (officially titled the Beijing Summit) to improve relations to aid in reducing the energy issue the country is facing.  Certainly taking an action such as this will tick off some in those African governments and may jeopardies further Sino-African deals?

We’ll have to see how this progresses.  They do need to do something about the drug problem…  But maybe a “crackdown” isn’t the best course of action?  Now, I’m all for harsh penalties for 100% guilty people… but the authorities need to be a bit smarter and not alienate everyone in the process.

It is interesting to note, well, maybe not really interesting, but…. any way, I was in this very area on Friday night, only ~2 hours prior.  Had I decided to stay around instead of going home for an early night (at 11PM), I might have witnessed this myself.

Oh well, can’t be everywhere…

No doubt the 3 of you who read my blog have heard about the incident in Sanlitun on Friday night (Sept. 21).  If you haven’t, read the following articles:

• Beijing Boyce:  Sanlitun smackdown targets blacks
• Africabeat: Beijing: Chinese police beat up Africans
• Reuters: Beijing police raid busy bar district for drugs
• Zhongnanhai Blog: Black men are rounded up and beaten in Sanlitun drug sting

Particularly, the Africabeat article has eyewitness quotes such as:

• “I think a lot of [foreigners] tonight were left questioning their decision to live here.”
• “I have not really ever seen anything so brutal,” my friend told me.  “There was blood all over the street. I will not sleep well for a long time.”
• This is not the first “roundup” of “drug dealers” of its kind in Sanlitun, but was apparently more brutal than usual.

I like this quote in the Zhongnanhai blog:

• The ambassador mentioned in the article that his son was beaten for no reason. He ended up spending the night in hospital.

Um, obviously he was beaten for a reason.  He was in the wrong place at the wrong time and the police had orders.  There, that’s your reason…
My favorite quote is the first one above where the person is questioning their decision to live in Beijing.  Well, um, I’m certainly not questioning my decision to live here simply from this incident.  If anything, it solidifies my decision to live here.  One less questionable person is better for everyone’s safety.  I’ve certainly seen these drug dealers many times and have been approached with “hey man…” or “sup?”.  But I ignore and move on.  But I often question why the authorities are allowing, or turning the blind eye, to this kind of garbage.

It’s one thing to have this kind of stuff going on in the back alleys where you need to know someone who knows someone who knows the password to get into a basement apartment… but this is happening right on the streets in front of legit establishments in the heart of sanlitun.  One of the comments in one of the above linked articles labeled Sanlitun as “seedy”. It is certainly getting that way and it’s a shame.

While I may not agree totally with the tactics of the authorities (racial profiling), something had to be done and this is simply a matter of being in the wrong place at the wrong time.

Here’s some advice to anyone who is worried about something like this happening to them, regardless of their skin color:

1. Don’t hang out in previously-known shady areas
2. Don’t loiter with shady looking fellows
3. Don’t look guilty
4. Oh, and if the Chinese authorities come running after you with long sticks, DON’T RUN!  Idiots…

There, simple as that.  If you’re not guilty, you’re not guilty.  It’s true that generally speaking, the Chinese authorities leave us foreigners alone to our own devices.  Just don’t be in the wrong place at the wrong time, and you’ll be left alone.

Oh, and, until we see actual photos or videos of the incident, any “first-hand eye-witness” accounts are total B.S.   Everyone has their own agenda influencing what they say.

Take it all with a grain of salt.

It’s Friday and this photo sums up this past week quite nicely…

I read on a few China-focused blogs this morning about a report put out by the “China Institute of City Competitiveness”. First of all, why would there be such an organization? Any way.. Some of the blog postings are:

• China Law Blog’s post entitled Beautiful China Cities. I Know It When I See It.
• bezdomny expatria’s post relevantly entitled make sure you’re sitting down…

The report mentioned above was covered by the China Daily, China’s English “Newspaper”, if you could call it that. Read the article here.

Hmm, sorry. Their evaluation criteria is simply bogus. And the scoreing against the criteria is rediculous - of course they don’t give the detailed results, so… Take this whole thing with a grain of salt.

Preservation of historical monuments - Ok, this is pretty good… but they did destroy the city walls back in the 60’s (?) to make way for the disaster they call 2nd Ring Road. .. That was just shameful.

Forest coverage - Um, no. “Forests”? They have small patches of trees here and there, and trees lining the streets in many places, but I wouldn’t call them forests. Translation error?

Air quality - Need I say anything about this?! You know what, as I write this, have a look what it looks like outside, and you can be the judge of that:

The transportation network - Sucks! Plain sucks! Subway is a joke (and will be a joke until the new lines are finished in like 10 years - too little too late). Buses are horrible. Impossible to get cabs on rainy days… Traffic is a monumental pain in the rear..

City life - What does this mean? Bars? Ok, they’re good. You can still find cheap food and drinks around town… But I am not sure that is what they meant…

Public space - Parks? Yes, there are parks…  And I don’t have the statistics of park size compared with other cities, but my idea of parks are large areas of lush grass with trees, running tracks, etc.  They don’t have that here.  Oh, and be sure to stay off the grass! Only for looking!

GDP - Good I guess…. I don’t know the numbers.

Any way, I think this is a ploy to prop up Beijing’s appeal ahead of the Olympics.  But any 5-year old could figure that out.

I think the usage of the word “Beautiful” is a bit lost in the translation. Why would Beautiful have anything to do with GDP or transportation?

Now, don’t get me wrong, I love Beijing.  Seriously.  It’s a great place to live, if you can ignore the negatives for a moment.  But I know a farce when I see one.

Beijing is “whole” now.  Hooters has come to town!  Yesterday, Sunday, was a soft opening, and I was there.  The food and sights, both free.  The official opening is this Wednesday, Sept. 12.  Tonight there’s some VIP event there, but, I’m not a VIP, so…  When you read about Hooters in Beijing on Tuesday,   remember, you heard it here first!

Prime real estate! Corner of Gongti and Xin dong lu. (Close to the old Frank’s place)

As a couple of my friends said: Sureal.  Enough said.

Unfortunately, the prices are a bit high - I think they’re targeting out of town foreign visitors, proper Expats, and well to do local Chinese who enjoy seeing scantly clad women.  So this will most likely not become a more than once monthly occasion.  But the wings? Damn good.  Will need to spend more time researching the difference between the Hooters wings and the Rickshaw’s wings.

I found this interesting link, this Andrew guy is dissecting the Chinese name (I also took a picture of it) .  Come on guys… “American Owl (or ‘Cat Head Eagle’) Restaurant”?  Can we not come up with a better name?  Like “美国大乳房餐厅”, or American (da rufang) Restaurant”? (I’m not going to translate da rufang, but you can guess what I wrote).  The name Owl Restaurant really, as Andrew points out, looses it’s meaning.  My proposed name is much better.

First, a disclaimer:  I’m no expert.  There, that’s all.

Several months ago, a popular outdoor rock climbing wall in Ritan Park here in Beijing had an accident - or should I say, one of the climbers had an accident. From what I have heard, someone (happened to be a foreigner, although this isn’t really relevant to this story) was near the top and on his way down when, and again, from what I heard, his Belayer kind of, sort of, let go.  Yes, let go.  Apparently there was no equipment malfunction - but who knows…  Information doesn’t exactly flow on trees here.

Any way, as I wasn’t there to witness this, I do, however, suspect this: the victim’s belayer was a foreign girl, probably chatting with her friends and not paying attention to the climber when she needed to most.  Guilt on her.

But this post isn’t about her.  I can only hope she learned her lesson and will never ever step foot in a situation that requires her 100% focus where people’s lives depend on her.

So, the victim fell quite a ways down.  From what a witness told me, his body hit the padding but his head smacked on the hard surface of the ground.  Ok, so there was padding in front of the wall, but it really was a sorry excuse for padding - nowhere near enough.  If there was “enough” padding (I am purposely leaving that nice and vague), should someone fall on it, the chances of survival would be increased quite a bit.  From zero.

The climbing wall was closed down for a couple of months.  Why? Who knows.

Fast forward to last weekend.  The climbing wall has been opened for a couple of weeks and I have friends who brave it each week.  To my shock, the padding was still crappy.  One of my friends told me they doubled the amount of padding.  Here are some photos I took:

Look at the padding above.  This is “double what it used to be”.  Unbelievable…

And the paddings aren’t even snuggly fitted - there’s a real nice gap there!

It’s a good thing the belayer has this under control - otherwise “KERSPLAT!”

Alright.  So, there STILL isn’t nearly enough padding around this wall.  What are these guys thinking!?!?!  Is one death not enough to warrant more padding?   Will another accident that results in a death make them realize they should do more to improve safety?  I hope it doesn’t have to come to that…

In the climbing wall management’s defense (if they deserve any), I was told also by my friend who frequents the wall that the management did considerably improve their oversight of the activities - specifically focusing more on the under-trained belayers.  Let’s hope that’s enough to prevent any further accidents.  But, things happen… you know?