September 15, 2018 to September 16, 2018
The Police
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It's been barely two weeks since I promised myself that I was going to attempt to avoid getting into arguments with the police. However, to mix metaphors, "a barrel of fish backed me into a corner".
Bai'an Township is an oxbow town on a trucking route just south of the Xingtai Gorges Geopark [邢台峡谷群地质公园] as well as a bunch of smaller, equally stunning, bits of mountain landscape that have recently begun to be developed for tourism. It was only oxbowed off a little over a year ago which means that the main street's current state of looking sad and tired and depressed is not something which was caused by oxbowing and the loss of truck traffic passing through.
AMap was showing me a cluster of hotels and restaurants about a kilometer past the end of the town proper on a road heading way up into the mountains and, having almost but not quite reached 50km for the day, I decided to at least start by going there and checking out a hotel or two for the hope of a comfortable bed.
The first hotel that "looked right" was a place called 书香 [the Fragrance of Books] but they didn't actually look open so I continued a little farther up the hill to 常来 [Visit Often]. The price was right. The bed in the room with a shower was soft. They'd never had a foreigner stay before but they had a computer and were going to let me register myself after I showered and changed out of my stinky bike wear.
It was perfect....
...Until it wasn't.
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I got out of the shower to be apologetically told that the owner—a very pleasant woman who (judging by the age of her kids) is probably five or six years younger than me—that she'd called the local police and been told "you don't have the license to accept foreigners", and that I was going to have to leave. If a nice, clean, obviously recently built, clearly tourist-centric B&B type hotel in an area that's started pouring funds into redeveloping itself as a tourism area wasn't "licensed to accept foreigners" then where was I supposed to go?
Xingtai City [邢台市].
Only 60km away as the crow flies.
Guess she didn't mention to them that I'd arrived by bicycle.
I emphasized to her that while her local police might feel perfectly confident in talking down to her and telling her what to do, and they might even feel perfectly confident in attempting to talk down to me, they had absolutely no idea who they were dealing with and that any attempts by the local police to tell either of us that I needed to leave would, most assuredly, be met by me complaining to provincial level authorities or higher.
Now, I'll admit, I've never actually complained to provincial level authorities (or higher) about shitty behavior on the part of local police with regards to telling me I can't stay somewhere because the merest fact that I'm threatening that I might do this has generally gotten the local police to back down.
Torn between the idea of telling a paying customer to go on a day that wasn't otherwise going to get much in the way of paying customers and risking facing problems for letting me stay, she let me sit down at the computer and register myself but insisted that after I registered we still had to go to the police station in person.
Just in case.
Which we did.
Where I made a nuisance of myself.
I never actually crossed the line of being openly disrespectful to them but I very clearly wasn't respectful. While the hotel owner stood quietly outside waiting for things to be handled, I repeatedly took every opportunity to wander into their nice warm office, sit down in the comfy chairs and look at them while they were trying to make phone calls to figure out what do we do! Not that I could have listened in on the phone calls anyways as the local version of Mandarin, while still recognizably Mandarin, is not especially easy for me to decipher. After the third or fourth time I was told to leave the office, and stop coming into the office, and stop sitting down in the office, they got me a comfy chair and put it outside for me to sit in.
Once I'd achieved this, I then chose to stand.
Because the local dialect is a Mandarin variant rather than some completely different Chinese, I'm sure that if I spent enough time around here, I'd eventually understand it. As it is, things that are not specifically directed at me often come across as long stretches of gibberish interspersed by sudden words and phrases that make perfect sense. Out of the middle of incomprehensible strings of sound, I caught the one officer saying "no, a translator isn't necessary, she speaks Chinese," and then a mobile phone was handed to me.
The woman on the other end tried to nicely explain to me that she was very sorry to inform me but Bai'An Township didn't have any 涉外宾馆 (a term which loosely translates as Foreigner Approved Hotel but which means much much more than that) and therefore I really was going to have to go back to Xingtai City. Transportation could even be arranged for me. (I didn't actually come from Xingtai City but they didn't know this yet.)
"Well of course they don't have any Foreigner Approved Hotels." I responded. "It would be silly to think that they'd have Foreigner Approved Hotels given that the rules and regulations for the implementation of Foreigner Approved Hotels were cancelled on a nationwide basis in 1998. With the possible exception of special administrative regions like Tibet, I don't think any Foreigner Approved Hotels are left anywhere in China."
There was a long silent pause on the other end of the phone. The cancellation of policies related to Foreigner Approved Hotels is one of those topics that Myf and I were trying to research and couldn't find any good information on but, more important than our inability to find the information is the knowledge that the information isn't there to find. This meant that just as we were unable to confirm the cancellation of Foreigner Approved Hotel policies or the year, the officer on the other end equally had no way to check whether or not I was bullshitting her or actually knew something she didn't.
Change of tactic. "But the hotels in this township don't have the computer system for registering foreigners."
"Of course they do." She started to try to say something but I steamrollered over her and kept talking. "It's the same system for foreign hotel guests as it is for domestic hotel guests. I already logged on and completed my registration before we came to the police station."
Another long silent pause and then "Could you give the phone back to the other officer please?"
Another twenty minutes went by after which they came to the conclusion that I would have to fill out a Temporary Residence Registration Form for Foreigners by hand and give them photocopies of the info page of my passport, my entry stamp, and my current visa. That all of this information was already filled in on the online system was irrelevant; they wanted a paper copy for their own records.
Back at the hotel, I carefully filled every field in by hand including largely irrelevant fields which the online system has but doesn't require you fill in such as "Job Position", and "Name of Host Organization in China". It is very important to note that my phone number, the phone number of a contact person, and the phone number of my employer were not any of the fields as, about three hours later, at 10:30 at night, I got a phone call from a higher up in the county police specifically calling my employer to bitch at them about their annoying foreign employee's unacceptable behavior.
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I don't think I've ever seen or heard somebody's attitude change as fast as the person on the other end of that phone call did as when he realized he was talking to me. Cause he went through god only knows what police databases to acquire my employer's phone number and now, I wasn't just some mouthy foreign employee who was insisting on being allowed to stay in a hotel because fuck you for trying to enforce nonexistent rules, I was a mouthy foreign company owner who was insisting on being allowed to stay in a hotel because fuck you for trying to enforce nonexistent rules. Instead of reaching someone who would agree with him about foreigners being annoying and perhaps even help with getting me in trouble with my boss for my treating the local police in such an unacceptable fashion that the county police had called my employers, he'd woken me up.
After some very apologetic insistence that I wasn't going to get in any trouble, and that he was very very sorry for waking me up, and that he hoped I was having a nice holiday in Xingtai County, he just wanted to let me know that, if it was convenient, they'd appreciate it if I would please come back to the local police station in the morning to:
- Give them a photocopy of the Work Visa which I had entered the country on as we had only provided a copy of my Residence Permit. (This is something I can't actually do since I last entered the country on a Work Visa sixteen years and four passports ago); and
- Make a formal statement regarding how it was I had somehow gotten to the far edge of their county by bicycle and yet didn't have any registrations which could be looked up on the computer between a week and a half ago and now.
And that was when the fun—for me anyways—really started.
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I never explicitly said to the police officers "I am a lot more important than you are." That would be worse than rude, it would be gauche. Instead I was incredibly super friendly and nice and cooperative. Or at least cooperative seeming. There's quite a distinction to be made between "seeming cooperative" and "actually being cooperative".
I gave them gifts (just my souvenir drilled pennies that simultaneously cost me next to nothing and are pricelessly irreplaceable). I pulled out my stove, made, and offered them coffee. I answered every question they asked—no matter how irrelevant to the matter at hand—especially when it gave me a Chinese water torture type opportunity to dribble out bits and pieces of information.
- Like just how much my bike cost.
- Like my company—the one that I own—having offices in three provincial capitals.
- Like my answering the nosy-normal "how much do you make a month" question with a figure approximately equal to their yearly income.
- Like my telling them the reason I went back to Beijing was to visit clients such as the Foreign Languages Press thus providing the opportunity to complain about how poorly central government clients pay and, at the same time, have a perfectly natural excuse to pull out the picture of my name in last year's book—the one written by Deng Xiaoping's son.
Despite providing totally accurate and totally useless information such as "the left side of the road," I couldn't avoid eventually providing enough information for them to know exactly where I'd spent my nights in Jiangjunmu Town.
This is unfortunate since, despite my being written down in the paper logbook, that hotel will probably get fined for not registering me properly. Possibly as much as 2,000 yuan. Even though they specifically made the choice to tell me they didn't want me registering on the computer and instead wanted me to just get written down in their paper logbook, if they get fined, they are not going to internalize it as "because we told the foreigner not to register", they are going to internalize it as "because we let a foreigner stay" and it will be that much harder for foreigners to stay in the future.
(Not that I especially imagine hordes of foreigners ever deciding to stay in Jiangjunmu but the owners of that hotel will have friends and family and acquaintances that they will bitch to about this fine and some of them might own hotels in other towns.)
I'm not worried about the hotel in Zhangmo (if you want to call it a hotel) getting in trouble as they appear to be owned by the People's Government of Zhangmo Township (at the very least the government offices share the same stairwell, hallway, parking lot, and squat latrine as the hotel).
Eventually, the interview was over. A copy of the condensed-out important stuff from the interview was printed out for me to sign along with a copy of the "I have been told and understood my rights" declaration. (Given the number of anti-corruption related checks and balances that China has, it will be a truly awesome thing if this country ever gets to the point of being as fair and impartial in reality as it is on paper.) Things were signed, dated, fingerprinted, fingerprinted, and fingerprinted again. (I swear I put more red inked prints of my right index finger on various locations on this particular formal statement than I did on the formal statement produced by my being interrogated by the Anti-Drug Smuggling Task Force officers during the Incident.)
Then my water bottles were filled with freshly boiled mountain spring water, I finished the last of my breakfast, and I left to go ride up a mountain.
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5 years ago
The family in Sweden showed up 15 hours before check-in for their reservation, were rude, weren't trying to pay, and made a scene which (in every video) makes them look like utter prats. Also, they happened to be assholes at the exact right moment when China was pissed off at Sweden over something completely unrelated.
5 years ago