As expected, I didn’t last too long in my job at the state-owned enterprise, and now I’m back to watching episodes of DS9 on youku.  

As per Jackie’s suggestion, I feel I should share some insights into the inner workings of the propaganda machine here, having now worked as a part of it, but really there’s not much to say.  The long and the short of it that these people are all idiots.  I didn’t find it much different from working in New Oriental.  There, our team of people, each person uniquely unsuited for their job, worked blindly to make a crappy product that would never sell.  And even though it was a private enterprise, my coworkers were concerned with censoring the content to make sure nothing remotely bad was said about anything, either in China or elsewhere.  

The SOE was just the same, except that it didn’t matter if their products didn’t sell, since they were government funded whether their products sold or not.  The only motivating factor for anybody seemed to be their fear of being publicly scolded by the boss, or “leader,” as they all called her.  People generally didn’t talk about or admit to the fact that the enterprise’s publications were created to satisfy part of the country’s propaganda program.  In fact, our “leader” would vehemently insist that we were making products for the market, and that in U.S. high schools, there was a real demand for educational videos about how glorious Beijing has become and how fortunate the Uighurs are that China has developed out West.  I can’t tell if she really believed that or not.  A few months back, the enterprise held its annual meeting, which I was asked to attend for some reason, and the president said at one point that of course none of our products were going to sell — our publications weren’t for the market, they were just published to meet a state need.  But when we got back to the office, our boss continued to insist that there really was a market imperative behind what we were doing.

One day when my department went out for lunch, my boss asked me in front of everybody if I knew what the Communist Party is.  I just wish I could have gotten all these experiences on video.  Just unbelievable.

Looking forward, the visa situation is getting ugly.  Today I confirmed with my agent a rumor that no agents in Beijing are able to extend visas past September 15th.  He said that the government or PSB had imposed this restriction because of some foreigners who had obtained visa extensions in Beijing, went to Guangzhou and did something that got them arrested.  Also, like last year, this is another special year for China.  He said he thought the restrictions would relax after the national holiday in October.

I’m not sure what my plan is.  I was considering a trip to Indonesia to visit Seb, and apply for a new visa there, but I’ve heard I won’t be able to get anything longer than a 30 day single entry.  I may just wait until the end of May when my current visa expires, pay for an extension until September and hopefully find a real job by them.  Here is to optimism!

I’m sorry I haven’t been writing.  I think there’s something wrong with my brain. Perhaps it’s all the Chinese.

The last time I was going to write was just after Christmas, when me and my friends all got detained overnight in a police station.  I got about halfway through a very detailed and winding narrative of the night when I became distracted and then forgot what happened.

I think it’s mostly that writing frustrates me.  My life could be portrayed so much more vividly and entertainingly in documentary format.  Particularly because so much of anything I want to write is inspired out of discontent, which comes off as whining self-pity.  If I had a videocamera on me at all times, then the tragicomedy of my existence in China could be fully appreciated.

But since I don’t, I’ll try to keep this brief again.

Let me begin by proudly introducing MomaDVD.com, Beijing’s first online DVD rental service.  This was an idea that my friends Guy and Jeff came up with.  I programmed and designed the site, Jeff is taking care of marketing and other distasteful tasks, and Guy is allowing us both to bask in the magnificence of his wisdom and experience (he founded jipingmi.com, a cool Chinese real estate search site.)  The site is in its infancy right now, and hopefully we will get enough users and interest to warrant me putting more time into development.

Also, I am now working for the Reds.  The coworker I got along with the worst from my last job recommended me for this position at a Chinese state owned enterprise, presumably out of spite, although it is paying my bills again.  Most of my benefits come in the form of gifts of food: I received one box of vacuum sealed precooked meats, five plastic wrapped rolls of fresh precooked meat and a bag of salty fish, along with packages of nuts and chocolates for the Chinese New Year.  Two weeks ago I got a box of sixty eggs for my birthday.  My birthday is in March.

The job is in a multimedia publishing house subsidiary to China Central Radio & TV University.  They make propaganda that promotes glorious Chinese culture among Western imperialist nations, while assimilating and patronizing the cultures of non-Han ethnic minorities, the 56 flowers of diversity in China.  Did you know the Jews were once briefly officially recognized as a Chinese minority?  I can’t find a citation offhand, but somebody told me this, and I find it endlessly entertaining.

I’ve been working on a few projects since I joined them.  I played a foreign manager in an educational video series on Chinese Business Culture.  The thesis of the series, as I understand it, is essentially that Chinese are emotional and considerate but stupid, while Westerners are robotically professional and cold.  I fit right into the character and exploited my Chinese underlings with calculating gusto.

I am also responsible for translating and editing a Chinese children’s geography book into English scripts for a video series for American high school students.  According to the book, China is a paradise, especially the regions fortunate to have discovered coal, and the Japanese devils still have a serious blood debt to pay for past atrocities.  My boss assures me there is market demand for such a product.  My boss is a moron.

I volunteered to take charge of the development and design of the school’s English website, which has given me a chance to play around with Joomla!, which I enjoy.  I am saving them thousands of RMB and headache from contracting this out to a Chinese development firm, who would overcharge for a crappy custom made CMS and make them cripplingly dependent on the firm for any changes, but everybody seems upset by the fact that everything I’m using is free.  Open source sounds terrifyingly insecure, and the school will feel that we are shortchanging them if we don’t spend all of their budget on this thing.  I am too naive.  The customary thing to do would have been to take the budget and spend it on an imaginary company and software licenses and then just keep it to myself.  When will I learn.

The Labor Bureau has now made employment restrictions so tight that I am unable to renew my license through the normal channels.  The girl in HR found an agency who can obtain a Foreign Expert’s Certificate for me for a sum of 5,000 RMB, which will somehow circumvent the Labor Bureau, but the company will only offer to pay for half of this.  I can’t blame them, since I’ve given them no hint that I intend to stay in this job for any longer than I have to, but I find the concept of paying to work hard to swallow.  My boss assures me that I am a drop of water amidst a vast sea, and no one will notice if I trickle out.  My boss is a bitch.

I am very excited about an interview I’m having this Thursday with Exoweb.  I decided that since I find myself spending all of my time in front of a computer no matter what I do, I might as well do something I enjoy.  Guy told me about this company and said it is supposed to be a great place to work, although he also said they have something like a 1 in 500 hiring rate.  I made a demo video of the game I programmed a few years back to put in my portfolio.  See how smart I was:

Other things of note:

• I learned to snowboard.  It is awesome.
• Hubert is moving out to go backpacking through the Stans for a year with Karim.  This fills me with ambivalence.
• My ayi has terrible Chinese, and it takes her four hours to clean the apartment, a task that I could probably do in under two.  I want her to go away.
• Frisbee is starting up outdoors again, and in fact I got Tao, another frisbee player, to move into Hubert’s room.
• My brain completely ceased functioning about 20 seconds ago.  End post.

Well it’s been more than a month since I left my old company to its inevitable prolonged withering demise, and have since promptly lost all motivation to continue posting here.

Despite my lack of creative impulse, things have been good.  I’ve been keeping afloat with a little bit of translating work for Greenpeace (see the PDFs), which fills me with a warm glow of self-righteousness and makes pandas shed tears of joy.  I’ve also been doing a little research into the possibility of realizing my long held dream of opening a bagel shop (and investors, I think this is a great opportunity for you.  A low risk alternative to the U.S. financial system, I think).  I should be moving into a nice new apartment with the French guys where I’ll finally have my own private bedroom at the end of this week, assuming the agent we’re using is only acting like an infuriating cheating lowlife scumbag and is, in fact, not.  And I just bought a roundtrip train ticket to Hong Kong next Thursday, where I’ll be going for a frisbee tournament for the weekend and picking up with a team from Manila.  The theme of the tournament party is “Enter the Dragon,” for which we were encouraged to do a performance where we display our “best kung fu style,” so I volunteered to do a little show, provided the girls on the team wear cheongsams and cheer.  This may or may not happen, but at any rate, I’ll pack my silks.

Meanwhile, we continue to enjoy beautiful blue skies almost every day, and it almost seems as if the Olympics never happened.

Don’t let the title fool you, I don’t actually love my job.

Nor have I seen Dr. Strangelove.

Nevertheless, it’s been such a long time and I wanted to write something about my job.  The reasons I haven’t written about it for so long are a mixture of respect for whatever nondisclosure terms might have been lurking in my contract, a fear of seeming disrespectful or disloyal to any potential future employers who might grace the pages of this blog, and mostly, the fact that my company’s website is so ridiculously awful and the content is so immensely stupid that it’s not even worth the space on this page to point it out.  I was also somewhat concerned that a coworker would stumble upon my site and I would be in trouble, except that a) my coworkers can’t really read English, and b) I kind of half want to get fired at this point.  So what merits this special occasion today?  Well, I just happen to be so numbed by the Olympics, the insipid circle-jerk of the media and its tumorous blogosphere, and the lack of any sensory input at my cubicle other than the near blinding glare off my furiously flickering CRT monitor, that I have no hope for any sort of mental stimulation other than to rant about my job.

Last year I did some research on the motivations driving journalists in China’s state media, and read an interesting paper on cognitive dissonance, and how journalists cope with conflicts between what they believe and what they are required to believe in order to succeed at their careers.  The paper presented a model with two spheres of discourse: public and private; and two ideologies: personal and state.  Journalists could then be classified into groups: those who expressed the state ideology in the public sphere but clung to their personal ideology in private, those who changed their personal ideology to conform with the state ideology in both spheres, and those who would sneak their personal ideology into the public sphere, etcetera etcetera.  This was a nice fancy way to understand journalists’ behavior, but did not really convey in a visceral way what exactly this “cognitive dissonance” feels like.

Now, having worked in this company for almost five months, I think I can say with confidence that now I know.

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As I began work this morning, and dove into my daily task of figuring out how to procrastinate for eight and a half hours, I started, as usual, by reading through the China articles on the New York Times website.  The first article to fall across my screen was yet another monthly reminder by Jim Yardley of why, exactly, the Chinese Communist Party is still in power, because apparently we keep forgetting.  Either that, or we’re just downright impatient.  The headline was:

China’s Communists, Resilient in Face of Change

A few hours later I found that the page had refreshed itself, inexplicably bearing a new title:

China’s Leaders Are Resilient in Face of Change

The second title is actually more fitting for the article itself, which is more informative and less colored than the first title would lead you to believe.  But I wonder what the explanation is for the title change.  Did it all of a sudden occur to some editor that “Oh yes, those pesky Communists are leading the country, aren’t they?  How inconvenient.”

On a related note, tomorrow is the opening ceremony of the Olympics, and in an unoriginal show of confused irony and ambivalence, I plan on wearing my I Heart China shirt.  Either that or an American flag;  I still haven’t decided.

Dreamy riot police, where are you now? (from www.telegraph.co.uk)

There was a crazy man on the subway during my commute this morning.  He sat across the car by the door and swore uncontrollably, punctuating the end of each string of curses with a tight swipe of his arm, as though he were smacking a child upside the head.  Then he would look around, half indignant and half afraid, and self-consciously stroke his long thin hair back behind his ear with the other hand.  As if suddenly remembering that the imaginary child hadn’t quite learned his lesson, he would then burst out with another barrage of cursing, and strike the air again with his palm.

This went on for at least ten minutes before I reached my stop.  Some people got nervous and went to other cars, and some people laughed at him openly.  Eventually one lady wearing a red security volunteer armband came by from the adjacent car and peered worriedly at the man.  People looked from the man to the lady, wondering if she would do something.  All the while the man kept cursing and making striking motions, and I couldn’t help but think of the guy on the bus in Canada who stabbed, decapitated, and ate a fellow passenger, and I wondered when Beijing’s strengthened police forces would finally show themselves, jump onto the train and subdue the poor bastard.

But the police never came and the lady in the red armband did nothing, and the man was still spitting and raving as I left.  What a disappointment.  If my tax dollars are going to go into all of this extra security for the Olympics, the least I can expect is instant and highly effective beatdowns at the first signs of disorder.

This was yesterday’s picture of the day on Telegraph.co.uk, taken at Crab Island, a beach resort area near Beijing.  Who is this guy?  He is my new hero.

Welcome, foreigner!

Although it’s been policy to require foreigners to register residency with their local PSB for a long time now, it’s probably only this year that the policy has grown some teeth, and the police have actually become insistent about enforcing it.  Just last week I found big white posters on the bulletin board by the gate of my apartment, and also on the doors to our units, marked with our police cartoon friend Jingjing (not to be confused with the Olympic panda mascot, whose name is spelled the same), giving us a friendly reminder to register at the local station for a temporary residence permit within 24 hours of the start of our stay.  And though personally so far I’ve been spared the intrusion, over the past several months I’ve been hearing stories from friends of friends who have had the police go door to door through their apartments asking to see foreigners’ registration and fining those without.

But what I just discovered, to my shock and awe, is that the PSB actually have our pictures in digital files on their network.  The other day, one of my housemates finally decided to transfer his registration from his old apartment to our place, and when he presented the rental lease to the policeman behind the desk, the policeman asked who his housemates were, and swiveled his monitor around to show him our files, complete with headshots.

I had heard that the PSB had networked their system a couple years back, but I had no idea that they scanned in our visa application photos!  I had assumed Chinese visa applications just got filed away to grow dust in some central storage, only to be retreived in extremely grave cases of political disobedience.  I am at once impressed and creeped out.  Anyhow, just something to consider when formulating white lies for upcoming visits to the PSB.

There is a cute row of sculpted plant people engaging in various Olympic sports on display near Baishiqiao.  The artists behind the installations must have run out of time or funds by the time they decided to furnish these green creatures with actual sports equipment, to quite an amusing effect:

The tennis and badminton players each have a ball and birdie respectively dangling sadly by a wire from their rackets.  I’d guess the tennis player is not actually supposed to be holding a tennis racket; he’d look much more comfortable with a kendo sword in his hands.  And I think the rifleman is aiming with something that might have been picked off a construction site across the street.

Don't be "excessive" when helping handicapped people. The diagram shows how to say "Beijing Welcomes You" in sign language.

Today I happened across a new series of posters on the neighborhood propaganda bulletin boards about etiquette to be observed during the Olympics.  Olympics propaganda is not new to Beijing, nor are paternalistic slogans on how to be a “civilized” citizen, but this new series in particular caught my eye because of one poster with a list of rules for how to act around foreigners.  Always curious to understand more about Chinese behavior towards us Western folk, I stopped to take a closer look.  Most delightful was a list of eight questions Chinese are not to ask us, which if observed, would leave these curious and enthusiastic hosts with essentially nothing with which to make conversation.  Following are some translated excerpts along with photos from some of the posters:

Smile When Communicating with Foreigners

A Smile is Beijing’s Best Business Card — A Smile is the Whole World’s Propriety

“Eight Don’t-Asks” When Chatting with Foreign Guests

Rules for Interacting with Foreigners

Don’t ask about income or expenses, don’t ask about age, don’t ask about love life or marriage, don’t ask about health, don’t ask about someone’s home or address, don’t ask about personal experience, don’t ask about religious beliefs or political views, don’t ask what someone does.

General Rules for Etiquette with Foreigners

One’s manners and bearing, and image should be graceful;
Be neither humble nor haughty, but at ease and self possessed;
Seek commonalities while reserving differences, have reason and integrity;
Adapt to others’ customs, respect ethical code;
Abide by agreements, adhere to promises;
Be enthusiastic in moderation, differentiate between insiders and outsiders;
Be appropriately modest, be affirmed in yourself;
Do not ask private questions, respect others’ customs;
Ladies first, be gentlemanly;
Seat honored guests on the right, and get along harmoniously.

(The man in the lower-left bubble says: “This is Mr. Peter.”)

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