China Daily: Foreigners who stay in China for more than six months will be required to give their fingerprints to local police when applying for residence certificates, according to a draft law submitted to the top legislature on Monday.

The draft law on the management of the exit and entry of personnel also empowers the ministries of public security and foreign affairs to decide if a foreigner should leave their fingerprints or other human biological characteristics when they enter China.

The proposal also stipulates that foreigners staying for longer than 180 days should apply for a residential certificate and leave their fingerprints.

Yang Huanning, vice-minister of public security, told lawmakers on Monday morning that the draft law can facilitate increasing people exchanges, while preventing those who should not come remaining outside the country.

The proposal also stipulates that foreign nationals, who own companies and delay wages to workers in China, cannot leave the country.

Foreigners suspected of illegal entry, stay and employment can be detained and investigated for 60 days at the longest if the case is complicated, according to the draft law.

I’m not at all against the government cleaning up the rather dodgy immigration system, but if time, money and energy is going to be spent to improve things, why not put some effort into making it more legitimate, friendly and fluid; rather than making foreigners feel like criminals the moment they arrive in the country. And what the hell is meant by “other human biological characteristics”… hair samples? Blood? Urine? Semen?

More at CRIEnglish.com.

For most of my life the OCP debate was completely absent in my daily dialog. I don’t know that I ever gave it a moment’s thought before coming to China. Living here though, and watching as China-centric headlines increasingly fill Western news cycles, it’s a topic that repeatedly finds its way into my thoughts — particularly now that I’ve filled my quota.

In the reverse, prior to leaving North American soil, the great Pro-Choice/Pro-Life battle regularly found its way into my readings, discussions and thoughts. Since coming to China, not so much.

The Pro-Life/Pro-Choice discourse, in my admittedly limited understanding, primarily boils down to a Religion vs. Liberty debate. The religious feel that it is murder to have an abortion, and the libertarians believe women should have the decision to do what they wish to their body. What I find interesting is that the All Girls Allowed organization mentioned above, and others like it, while being aligned with the ‘pro-life’ camp, are primarily forwarding an argument of liberty: The OCP is immoral because it forces women to murder their unborn babies. It removes choice, and not for a fetus (as I’m sure someone is just itching to poke a hole in my description with), but specifically for the women involved. They are pro-choice.

Ok, not exactly. Their “pro-choice” only extends to allowing a women to have as many babies as she wants, not to her having the option of terminating the pregnancy should she choose to do so. Ultimately there’s an agenda there that would one day see the organizations switch to a similar rhetoric that their beliefs push to a Western-facing world — namely the encouragement of a system for authoritarian control of what women can and can’t do with their bodies.

And this is where organizations like the above lose my support. Their message is soured, to me at least, by their affiliation to religion and the beliefs that come with it that restrict another person’s liberty. I have a hard time seeing action spurred by religion, no matter how well-intended, as anything but devious. I know many readers are religious, and I know that statement is going to be a volatile one.

I wear my aversion to religion rather overtly. However, I am not trying to say that all actions of the religious are devious, simply because of their beliefs. There are plenty in the Faithful masses, just as in the non-believer circles, that do good simply because good needs doing, and not because someone or something told them it was the key to a magical place.

But ultimately, I can’t take seriously any organization that puts, as a cornerstone of their operational philosophy, prayer (nestled right between “Get Involved” and “News & Resources”). Adding “god” to an NGO is like adding made up interviews to a New York Times investigative piece. It strengthens your point to anyone who emphatically believes you or what you do, but muddles its validity and challenges your motivations with anyone even remotely skeptical.

I believe it is wrong to force a woman to abort her baby due to our rather fuzzy understanding of population and population control. And when that baby is nearly full-term, I think that’s criminal. It brings me to tears thinking about it, and I am not strong enough to spend too long considering what it must actually be like for women, for families, to actually go through that. To borrow a phrase, late-term abortions are murder. An abstract idea of “possibly better for the common good in the long term” does absolutely zero to temper my feelings about this. I would think anyone with a child feels similarly.

But when the mandate of your organization has a dark shadow just out of sight that would eventually likewise force women to sacrifice their liberty for what someone else feels is right, how can I support you? How can your message hold validity when it is tainted with the same self-righteousness and suppression that on the surface it is trying to stop?

Subtitled with “A Cautionary Tale for Expats in China“, I was curious to read both what Carver endured and, perhaps most voyeuristically, what he did to get there.

His description of the long boring days (all eight of them), spartan comforts, and brief brush with man-on-man-on-man action were not without their charms. However, throughout the telling, I was finding it hard not to feel like Lionel got exactly what he asked for.

Carver’s reason for landing in the clink is pretty much absurd, from start to finish. Washing up in Shanghai, in search of the “jade dream”, he immediately shrugs off the ESL racket to try his hand at a less-worn path. He takes a job with a real-estate company that promises him regular pay and a Z-visa — neither of which materialize.

Eventually my 3-month tourist visa expired. I thought I would be okay as long as I laid low—but I was wrong. There are eyes everywhere in China, especially on foreigners.

It was in Huaqiaozhen, a suburb of Shanghai, that everything began to unravel. I had just signed a lease for a cheap, shared apartment, but, strangely, the landlord never came to collect the rent or sign the contract.

One Saturday morning I awoke to a knock at my door. I answered, thinking it would be the landlord, only to come face to face with a PSB (Public Security Bureau) officer checking identifications for registration.

Carver repeatedly fails to renew his visa or register with the PSB/police station. He also continues to rather blatantly dodge the authorities, who are quite obviously aware something’s, well, dodgy about this fella. He was finally busted after hiding out on his balcony in sight of the cops below — no translation needed, that screams “guilty of something” in all languages.

They took him to the station, explained he was staying in the country illegally with an expired visa (a fact that surely came as no surprise) and had the option to either pay a fine or go to jail for eight days. I’m pretty sure if we knew Lionel, like personally, we all would have known from the outset that going to jail was the option he would choose. I mean, his decisions up to that point hadn’t exactly been stellar — at least he’s consistent.

Go check out the whole story (really there’s bed shaking prison love that would make Tobias Beecher clench). “A Cautionary Tale for Expats in China” though? I don’t know iLook China well enough to know the blog’s readership all that well. We get a mixed bag of readers here at Lost Laowai though, and I’m decently confident this will be anything but a cautionary tale to most, if not all, of them.

In case some half-wit happens by though: if your visa is expiring — get it renewed. Do not stay in a country without a visa. It’s not hard. It’s not expensive. It’s certainly better than spending a week in jail. And if you do accidentally do overstay your visa (and it better involve a one-legged Mongolian prostitute, the Russian mafia and a case of baijiu) for christ’s sake, pay the fine. Or, better yet — just take the fucking teaching job in the first place.

I figure I use the things that tax money buys. I use the roads and the street lights at night. I use the parks and the heavily subsidized public transportation.

So I figure it’s only right that I ought to pay taxes.

My tax rate really isn’t all that high.

In fact, my accountant’s monthly fee to file my taxes is more than my taxes are most months. And that’s before the accountant plays around with numbers on forms so that I can be billed less.

Point of fact, however, avoiding paying my taxes is significantly easier than paying my taxes.

The first time I needed proof that taxes had been paid, I was still under the limit for minimum monthly income for a foreigner. It took me and my translator d’jour visits to three different offices before I could find anyone who knew anything about providing the proof let alone that I was proving payment in full on a net nothing.

The first time I had an employer who paid me pre-tax instead of after, attempts to find out how to pay my taxes were all but ignored by the government bureaux I talked to. They didn’t exactly say “go away” or “it’s not necessary” because saying that would be wrong. They just looked at me oddly and said things like “why do you want to know?” and “it’s not that important.”

The first time my business had a really large sum of eminently taxable income the tax bureau employee at the counter actually told me she had no idea how to do the paperwork on earnings that weren’t in renminbi and if the client didn’t want a receipt, I really shouldn’t bother.

In the end, I didn’t bother.

Only some of the forms were in triplicate.

I tried to sign up for the easy online tax payment system for issuing tax receipts when clients paid me but it was so complicated and poorly designed that the person in charge of the training class had problems figuring out how to undo the mistake he deliberately made in front of the class with the specific intent of showing us how to undo it.

Disregarding the fact that this was the instructor who teaches the class twice a day every day, if a native speaker of the language is having that kind of trouble with the “easy” system, I don’t need easy I can tolerate going downtown, standing in line, and going to the counter to get my official receipts. And if I did it that way, I also wouldn’t need to buy a dot matrix printer.

I did my tax receipts at the counter twice without any real problem. My foreignness made the employees a little more generous with regards to helping me fill out forms than they might have done for a Chinese person but as long as the forms got filled in correctly, I was happy.

Last Wednesday, I went to do tax receipts for the third time.

And I couldn’t.

I could go into all the details of explaining how the first counter I was at wanted to see a receipt book I’d never been given, how the leader on the fifth floor tried to explain that the easy online payment system was now mandatory for businesses, and how I eventually got special dispensation to be a counter customer despite having a tax license for businesses.

I don’t need to go into all those details.

I just need to explain that as I left the counter, with my taxes still unpaid because I didn’t have the newly-required-since-September-21st photocopy of the contract between me and my client, I snapped at the woman “I’m trying to do what’s right here. I’m trying to pay my taxes. I live in this country and I use public facilities that are paid for with taxes. Clearly, you don’t want me to pay them and would prefer that I go out of my way not to. I will get the contract and come back but, in the future, I will be telling every client of mine that doesn’t absolutely require a tax receipt that I don’t normally issue tax receipts and I don’t pay my taxes because the tax bureau prefers to make not paying taxes easier than paying them.”

She didn’t have an answer for me.

Let’s make a deal

Simply put, gift recycling is the selling of presents by recipients who neither want nor need them. The majority of such exchanges take place inside the countless cigarette and liquor stores found along any Chinese city street. Indeed, high-end cigarette brands such as Chunghwa and Panda, along with the famous baijiu labels Moutai and Wuliangye, are among the items most frequently brought in by customers and bought by store owners. But many recyclers accept a wide range of gifts. More exotic presents such as birds’ nests, shark fins and sea cucumbers are also typically welcome.

There are limits, though, to what recyclers are willing to trade. One Guangzhou store owner declared that he refused to buy back Double Happiness brand cigarettes – a favorite gift at weddings – because they don’t fetch a high enough price.

A customer with unwanted gifts to sell can frequently get a decent price for their goods, but naturally any deal favors the recycler on the other side of the counter. An investigative report conducted in February by a local newspaper in Jiangxu found that on average, cigarettes are bought for twenty to thirty percent less than the usual market price. Liquor, on the other hand, is typically bought for as little as half the market price. Purchased goods are then resold at or slightly less than full price. A similar survey in Henan found local customers getting a far worse deal, being offered an average of seventy percent less than the store price.

While most shop owners are willing to bargain, one long-time recycler in Zhengzhou told a local reporter that the sellers usually just aren’t interested. “Some people who come in, they’re not poor, and they don’t really care. If I give them a low price, as long as they see there’s money to be made, they’re ok.”

“People like this are becoming more and more common,” he added.

Open for one week, eat for a year

Even with a customer willing to bargain, a single exchange will almost always bring the recycler a bigger profit than an ordinary sale. But it is the volume of such transactions which makes gift recycling such a lucrative business.

Almost all of the recycling that takes place in a given year centers around two holidays: the Spring Festival at the start of the new year, and the Mid-Autumn Festival in September. One recycler in Jiangsu boasted that in the week following the Spring Festival he could make enough to see him through the end of the year.

Typical estimates put the average gift recycler’s profits for a single holiday in the hundreds of thousands of yuan, or tens of thousands of US dollars. Such numbers far exceed the country’s per capita income of 4,260 USD, according to the World Bank.

A rapidly transforming business

While cigarettes and liquor have traditionally been the mainstay of the business, in some cities they are quickly being overtaken by a popular new gift item. A gift recycler in Zhengzhou told the Henan Legal News that since 2009, her business has primarily dealt in gift cards. Another Zhengzhou recycler explained the process: a card worth 200 RMB might be purchased by the recycler for 178, and then resold for 189 RMB.

But the market for second-hand gift cards is relatively small. Most individual gift recyclers resell the cards to larger outfits, who in turn resell them in bulk to the store which originally issued the cards. Occasionally, recyclers simply use the cards themselves, buying still more liquor and cigarettes to sell in their own stores.

In recent years, gift recycling has expanded beyond its brick-and-mortar beginnings and established a rapidly-growing presence on the internet. A search for “recycle gifts” on Baidu brings up over thirty million results. The growth of online gift recycling can be explained, not surprisingly, as an issue of convenience.

“A lot of customers don’t particularly enjoy taking their gifts to the actual store to sell them,” one recycler explained to Guangzhou’s Southern Daily newspaper. “Trading on a website is more convenient.” After a transaction is completed online, the two sides schedule a time for pick-up at the seller’s home or another place of their choosing.

Hidden costs

But gift recycling can be a risky business, for both customers and store owners. As an off-the-books, underground enterprise, gift recycling is often linked to organized crime, particularly the flourishing trade in counterfeit goods. According to Chinese law, gift recycling itself is an illegal activity, as it involves businesses engaging in activities not authorized by their state-issued licenses.

But one official with China’s State Administration for Industry and Commerce told the Henan Legal News that prosecuting the trade is all but impossible. “If questioned, shop owners will insist that the gifts they buy back are simply for their own personal use, not for reselling,” he said. The widespread lack of any bookkeeping further means that the physical evidence required to bring charges against recyclers is almost impossible to find.

Not only is the practice difficult to prosecute, but officials have little incentive to do so.  Indeed, many of the most frequent and large-scale patrons of gift recycling businesses are government employees eager to unload the cartons of cigarettes and bottles of baijiu presented to them by ambitious underlings.

And so one of the most frequent ways that experts and cadres describe gift recycling is to simply call it a “gray area.”  Indeed, with such a name it joins a long list of other activities that make up a crucial part of China’s economy.  And as such, it is likely to remain a regular presence in Chinese society for years to come.

That is to say, I’m quite open to the concept of a man with a purse-like device. Being “practical” is manly, even in heels and a dress. But upon moving to China, I noticed that the men of the Middle Kingdom take things to a whole new level. There were some ground-rules to murse-wearing in the West: it shouldn’t be fancy; if it wasn’t on your back, most of it should rest below your hips; think more Indy than Cindy; and the width of its strap was inversely proportional to its level of femininity.

Chinese men seemed, by comparison, to have quite literally “clutched” on to metrosexualism in a more drastic way. Seeing men walking around with designer purses that looked perfectly suited to carry a tampon and a compact just seemed bizarre.

But then I’ve never been much for status or fashion — my work uniform is a frayed 12-year-old hoodie and a cheap pair of bargain jeans.

According to an article just published in the LA Times, Chinese men represent a whopping 45% of the designer handbag market — a figure that sits around 7% in the US (and no doubt much less among my hocky-lovin’ hoser kin to the north).

At business meetings and social events across China these days, many of the Prada, Louis Vuitton and Burberry bags are being toted by the fellows in the crowd.

Wang Zhongzhu, a 42-year-old insurance executive, wouldn’t dream of networking without his $1,000 leather Dunhill slung over his shoulder. He said the creamy brown mini-messenger bag sends a message that he appreciates — and can afford — fine accessories.

“It’s a way of representing where you stand,” Wang said. “It makes people think you could potentially work for a big company.”

Designed for men, many of these guy purses often known as shou bao in Mandarin would be right at home in the women’s handbag section of an upscale department store. Popular styles include the oversize wallet with wraparound zippers like Zhang’s and the embossed leather Coach handbag with the slinky shoulder strap and handles. Colors trend toward solid brown, black and gray. But some fashion-forward gents don’t mind showing a little flash: Burberry plaid, Gucci’s interlocking GG pattern or Louis Vuitton’s distinct LV monogram.

Luxury leather goods makers can’t believe their luck: Both sexes in the world’s most populous country adore purses.

Men represent 45% of the $1.2-billion market for all luxury handbags in China, according to Victor Luis, president of Coach Retail International. That figure is just 7% in the U.S.

I’ve oft joked that China would be a great place to open up an umbrella company, as rain-or-shine your product sells; perhaps I should have been looking at what was in the other hand.

Then Youtube gets blocked, Facebook and Twitter follow, as do pretty much all major UGC/SMS sites. Ok, ok, it’s a complete pain in the ass, seems totally backwards and is making the country look more like its paranoid DPRK neighbours than a major player on the world stage. But maybe things were getting a little too out of hand with free speach 2.0, and the whole system needed to be throttled a bit to keep Zhongnanhai comfortable with modernization.

But this is just getting ridiculous:

Shanghai Daily: The Chinese regulator has declared Internet phone services other than those provided by China Telecom and China Unicom as illegal, which is expected to make services like Skype unavailable in the country.

The decision was criticized as a measure to protect the duopoly of state-owned telecom carriers, media reports said yesterday.

The Ministry of Industry and Information Technology said all VoIP (voice over Internet protocol) phone services are illegal on the Chinese mainland, except those provided by telecommunications carriers China Telecom and China Uniom. The ministry gave no timetable on when the ruling takes effect.

While the news certainly has the sheen of classic capitalist monopolistic greed parred with a healthy dose of official-oiling guanxi (an outrage in its own right), effectively it comes back down to control. One pipe in, one pipe out. The Walls are closing in. Soon we’ll not be allowed to own a computer without government registration and real-time tracking installed.

Some days are days to remind me why I live here, and some days are days to remind me why I never take an eye off of leaving.

This notion of predictability got me to thinking about something I had read from Paul Denlinger a few days back:

Jeremy Goldkorn seems to agree:

When we think of media bias about China, we typically think about how Western media often takes advantage of American’s love of hating China (for example, see Rein on the NYT). Many of us reading China news tend to be far more trusting of “old China hands” instead.

But I guess just as we have to question our media sources and look for possible factors that compromise their voices, we should also question our Laowai thought leaders in much the same way.

Do you think that the opinions of  “China thought leaders” are very heavily influenced by their business ties?  And if so, should they be stepping into the media spotlight at all?

*Note: My knowledge of Rein is pretty superficial, and I don’t want to make any conclusions about him from reading this one article. I’ll keep reading his columns in the future, and will make my own conclusions later on.

Though I am confident that the contents of the article are not in any way libelous, as Ellis claims, his threats did not limit themselves to seeking a court decision on whether or not they were libelous. Instead they indicated that Chris would personally attempt to get this site blocked in China and have myself and the other authors of this blog harassed by the local PSB (under the allegation that we are in some way acting as “investigative journalists” by blogging about being expats in China).

Though it pains me to remove it, I also feel whatever truth was in the original post is not worth the hassle and headache Ellis promised to make of it. I do however feel it is my responsibility to post this notice to let all our readers know what happened to this post. Please accept our apologies.

There are few things that make me tingle like the principle of microfinancing does. I’d like to think I have a philanthropist’s heart (if not the wallet), and as much as I believe “give it and forget it” charities unarguably do amazing things for this world, microfinancing is just way cooler than traditional charity models.

It brings “charity” down to a more even level, where “givers” become lenders and “the poor” become borrowers. Not only is it financially empowering, but it is emotionally empowering as well. That Courtney McColgan and Casey Wilson (Wokai’s co-founders) have taken this and applied it to China’s impoverished deserves not applause, but ovations.

How it works

With China recently beating out Germany for the bronze-medal spot of world economies, and with it projected to scoop Japan’s #2 position in the next three years, an obvious question is why China? or, more specifically, why shouldn’t China solve its own problems?.

In a recent presentation at a Google Tech Talk, Wokai co-founder and CEO Casey Wilson answered by explaining, “There’s still some huge issues facing China that I really don’t think will be solved by the natural course of economic development.”

Even with a huge economy and lightning-fast development, there are still 300 million Chinese living on less than $1 USD/day (an entire America of people below the poverty line). And though it’s true that China is going through rapid growth and working hard to elevate its people out of poverty, it’s simply not enough.

The country has a widening divide between its rich (largely east-coast) urban areas and the 737 million-strong population in its poor rural countryside.

Wokai Team: Wokai intern Amy Shi, Dir. US Ops Courtney McColgan, CEO Casey Wilson, and Wokai Advisor Tom Gold

As Casey explained to the crowd at Google: “No matter how good of a product we build online, we need a community of contributors to actually access our Web site. So the major question we had while we were developing Wokai was ‘how do we actually build a community of contributors online?’ We realized we really had to go offline to get that community. Unlike Expedia or Amazon, people don’t wake up in the morning thinking ‘how am I going to use this $10 in my pocket to contribute to someone?’

To date, Wokai has built chapters in San Francisco, Seattle and New York City. The chapters are generally made up of professional volunteers working in finance or law, on their PhDs, or involved in Web development – but becoming a chapter member is open to all and the organization is constantly looking for volunteers to open new chapters.

Whether you want to contribute, get involved, or just learn more, be sure to check out Wokai.org.

Also, be sure to check out Casey’s full Google Tech Talks presentation: