The Local Laowai

Weekends are fun in Switzerland. Get in your four-wheeler, drive along, and — that’ll be it. Drive and drive. If you’re hungry or thirsty — stop by the next freeway rest area. Nope, the local corner shop is — shut — Sundays at least. I did a few test drives through the nation on Sundays — when everyone was at church, the village felt like a North Korean ghost town.

Chinese weekends are even more fun. Those traffic jams seem to get everywhere on Saturdays and Sundays (Saturday jams can get more vicious than your weekday variant outside of the CBD), and you seem to be locked in lines after lines when you shop. That’s because Beijing (and all of China, in fact), don’t take the weekend off.

Like your Local Laowai. Weekends are workdays — you can even arrange to meet him. Although being a bit Swiss, you’ve got to act — the Swiss David Feng does not call you, out of fear that your Sunday might be disturbed.

I’ve started blogging at blognation China. It’s been a few days, and I like it there. There’s quite a bit of support, trackbacks and I’m “beginning to get noted”. I’m also a frequent blogger at my own Beijingology Notebook.

That’s the funny thing. I’m blogging for organizations that are either outside mainland China or are “Western-oriented”. Being in lesser libre media organizations on the mainland, I feared when someone around the place would start editing or taking down my posts. (Digital Power “de-revolutionalized” my Mac-speak column without my OK, and that’s why they need to sign a content agreement contract before another David Feng article reaches these people. I don’t take censorship lightly.) The media in the PRC are getting more and more open, but it’s still not the full un-wrapping, as they say.

That’s another funny bit in me. As much as I’d love to advertise the fact that I’m a citizen of a free, fair and equal nation (Switzerland), there’s that nagging alter ego that tells me that I’m still Chinese. It’s not a total un-wrapping on my end either. But I’m convinced that it’s better to remain half un-wrapped (so to speak) if that’s what it takes to save me from going on an uncontrolled fit of self-aggrandizement — and burning myself in the progress. Sometimes, care and restraint can go the extra mile to “keep you held within the system” — and save you from going nuts, in essence ripping apart what you’ve already done.

Meanwhile, I’m taking my new post as editor of blognation China seriously, giving the readership insight into what makes the Chinese Web 2.0, mobile and enterprise markets tick. But no — never “too seriously” — and, as always, with a healthy dose of David Feng humor.

Hopefully, the kind of humor that you can’t find anywhere else.

I was just chatting with Mac, our secretary of the user group. We were talking a lot about biz stuff in China, about biz practises and all that kind of stuff. I also chatted with Crystal from CMU and we were on about my projects. Through those two chats, I realized that weird things were happening with Chinese biz people:

1. The first question you are asked when you start a new project is, “Does this make you any money?” For those who haven’t done so, my private bible (so to speak) is from this immortal document from Guy Kawasaki. This is pretty much as close as The Truth comes to in this people’s republic of 1.3 billion.

Read pointer number 9 as many times as you want. There are way too many Audi A8Ls, niubiist post-doctorates, and cussed-they-be cloners on the streets of Beijing. Either you get super-rich and run people over, or your brain is doctored up in degree after degree and you’re still useless, or you go around and copy other people’s work.

Pursue joy, not happiness. For God’s sake, I’d give my right arm, in this sense, to be a Kawasaki-ism advocate. Way too few people understand that life is not just about the superficial.

2. Are you rehashing the same old same old? This is a big question for a lot of new startup websites. Yeah, YouTube did it — so all of China has gone wild nuts copying it. We’re seeing the second dot-com crash in the PRC if this thing gets out of hand.

Few people take the £*% to innovate and to break through. Breaking through is what did a lot of great things — the reunification of Germany, for example; they busted the Berlin Wall and reunited a nation. Apple, too, is a big breakthrough company. The Great Leader His Steveness loves to push the envelope. People know the MS imperialists lead by Bill and Ballmer as outright copycats, and the Great Leader is feared by many because nobody knows what CIA-level secret plan Our Steve has — to break through some ill of the tech world and to churn out a great new Apple innovation.

3. You shape the world… even in death. When you die, your accomplishment survives, but hey — you don’t get to take a single Mao/Chiang/Le Corbusier/Her Majesty/Ben Franklin note with you into your next life (if you believe in one). Thomas Edison died, and now the lamp’s everywhere. Louis Pasteur died, and now all milk is pasteurized. Mendeleev died, but not without giving a real big contribution to the world of chemistry — the Periodic Table of Elements.

So, are we interested in innovation or just the money?

So here I am, at a tea house, dying for some peace and quiet on a Sunday morning. (Back in Switzerland, the tea house itself may already be closed — remember that Switzerland takes Sunday off for real!) This supposedly obnoxious corporate boss then comes in (I’m in a private room), and sits across and — I think — starts talking to one of those waitresses as if they knew each other.

This is a big problem with those corporate bosses — they get rich and then they think they know everyone. So they start “showing it off”, so to speak. They either go to tea houses and let it out on the waitresses, or they lie home watching what is apparently the second DDR-Fernsehen in the making (quality and entertainment value-wise): mainland Chinese TV. (Do the maths: watch something like Swiss TV (over the Web) or even CNN, and then watch mainland TV; you’re sure to spot the difference.) They never get productive.

This is something that I have one hell of a big problem with in China. If I don’t know the guy or the gal, he or she is left in peace. There are no exceptions to this.

I think we all have something called privacy…

Ask my (current) former girlfriend for the details. She was sending me way too many SMS messages than I could handle. Fortunately, Chinese law was now mature enough to protect people’s private lives and to root out excess texting as a crass disturbance to one’s personal life.

Maybe romance and the Law shouldn’t really cross too much. But a record six SMS messages did it for me. I told her to stop the messages, and to proceed with life the way it is. If she wanted in on BeiMac, I say that’s fine for her. But mainly, the message at the end of the day: please, please… don’t meddle… don’t interrupt my private life. I’ve a lot of stuff to do…

…and I included references to Article 51 of the Chinese Constitution (citizens may not exercise their rights in such a way that the rights and interests of others are infringed upon) and Article 42 item (5) (excess text messaging is a disturbance to other people’s private lives). She rang me back, horrified, and really scared that I was going to report this case to the cops.

I actually did do that once — some guy/gal with too much time on his/her hands dropped a message on my Teana. “Illegal parking… load in CNY 2,000 into my cellphone… or, ‘hey hey’!…” That did it for me — the guy got a call to 110 and was reprimanded all right for threatening me. I went to the police station with my friend and actually reported the case — no bull.

Hey, it turns out that the Chinese Constitution is not written on toilet paper. This thing has teeth. Swiss people are a law-abiding lot… yours truly included.

Sometimes, the credibility of quite a few Beijingers is getting ever closer to the loo. Take, for example, the infamous northwestern 6th Ring Road. Not only did that bust my tyre, it also opened 2 years behind schedule!

Here’s the whole story. See for yourself…

April 2004: Work on NW 6th Ring Rd gets underway.
October 2004: Reports flow in: NW 6th Ring Rd still likely to open “this year”.
November 2004: NW 6th Ring Rd now opening “early next year”.
2005 reports: “2 km of the NW 6th Ring Rd remain to be built”.
Late 2006: NW 6th Ring Rd finally opened in full.

Hey guys, it’s your credibility on the firing line!

Max Brugger (of Fertig Lustig fame) gave the Swiss police quite a rubbing when he requested they search his whole apartment to make sure no stolen moped landed there. (The police would have arrested Max, by the way, if they found a stolen moped there — and Max didn’t want the cops second-guessing him.) His claim to fame came with the legal line: “Als Staatsbürger and Steuerzahler!” (”as a tax-paying citizen!”).

Article 9 of the Chinese Nationality Law kind of makes my old, 1982-era Chinese hukou legal moot, because according to that article, my Swiss nationality overshadowed my Chinese “legal me” on August 10, 2000 — the day I got my Swiss passport. However, I still feel very Chinese, and I want to help my de facto (but not de jure) fellow citizens pay their taxes — something stated in the Chinese Constitution as a citizen duty!

In the 1990s, China Post stirred it up big-time when it gave birth to a stamp which proclaimed, for all the world to see, “IT IS THE RESPONSIBILITY OF EVERY CITIZEN TO PAY TAX” in red, 1980-ish all-boxed-font. That stamp has come and gone, but it made quite an impact to your law-abiding blogger during a brief visit back to the zuguo in the early 1990s.

Onwards. I wanted to make sure that even the folks at the local tea house paid their taxes. See, if you don’t ask for a fapiao, you get no chance to hand that cash over to the authorities — income remains undeclared until you issue a fapiao. And if your company doesn’t force you to do baoxiao, fapiaos are little more than zhitou (纸头) — pieces of paper just lying around. So I asked for a CNY 20 fapiao.

I ended up getting a pre-issued fapiao issued by some restaurant the waitress went to. This was not OK — the tea house, remember, had to pay the taxes! So I insisted. They came up with a lame excuse: “Let me print one for you when you top CNY 100 in purchases!”.

I held to my line. “I have to help you pay your taxes as required by the Constitution. I’m requesting a CNY 20 fapiao. See, I can’t let you do stuff that’s illegal!”.

Boom. Within 2 minutes, an official fapiao — by the tea house — to the tune of CNY 20 — came out.

Do you really have to do legal threats to do what the Law asks you to do?

The attention to detail paid by some Chinese car washers is good, but for others, it’s pretty lamentable. Aiyihang (爱义行) by Gaobeidian, Beijing, is one of the more attentive places, but even so, someone mistook me as a guy with Aiyihang when he caught me scrubbing my Teana with ever-so-Swiss precision. (Apparantly, I was tooAiyihang to be a real Aiyihang guy.)

The Teana. This guy has been — and seen — it all through. 210 km/h on the Jingcheng Freeway. 208 km/h into tunnels and 203 km/h outside. Me and the Secretary at Pentium-incinerating speeds. So it comes as little to no surprise that I encountered chips, cracks and your garden variety of minor blemishes on the front of the car. The license plate was kind of screwed up — too many shizitou (石子头) — fragments of tiny rock on the front of the car. However, it was like 101 miles away from being a dapolar (大破烂儿) — that is, a screwed-up, bent-up (as I’d like to say) car. (I say bent up because if you do a frontal collision, the hood looks like you’ve bent it — or rather, JAWS did the work.)

There were quite a bit of byrdshyt (apologies to the music group) left here and there. I went through pains getting this thing free of bird dumpings and other gross nonsense. One poor BeiMac member gave it the quits through the neck after too much Yanjing last night, so bits and bobs of beer barf was still left (it was sick already — but we’re talking about fractals — tiny bits of that stuff). The attention to detail I paid was nothing short of Swiss.

I don’t think anyone at Aiyihang saw anything close to this Swiss-quality cleanliness. Most dige (的哥) — taxi drivers — hunong (糊弄) or just rush through the whole process. To them, Sauberkeit is Bahnhof — it’s a foreign thing.

I feel like shrieking every time I encounter a bit of gum on an SBB 1st class seat. I try my best and keep away from that. It’s too natural of me. It’s typical Swiss behavior.

The kind of behavior that earned me a Swiss passport. (Presumably).

When Beijing held its Sino-African summit, the cops did everything to block trucks from the domain that is the nation’s capital. Even non-Beijing cars inside the city weren’t granted total freedom inside the 4th Ring Road. And, of course — there were no traffic jams back then.

I heard one of my coworkers today yell, “Come back! Our African friends — COME BACK!” as we were on about the madness that is the city at rush hour. Massive traffic jams, incredible pileups, and bumper-to-bumper madness. Contrast that with the first six days of this month; virtually no jams, fluid traffic, but also the odd route or the odd bit sealed off, diplomacy be thanked.

Beijing’s idea to build underground freeways, by the way, will hit upon a brick wall. God knows that Beijing’s taxi drivers (plus bus drivers, folks from the military and drivers of Jinbei vehicles) all drive the average driver (pardon the pun) up the wall. We don’t want a crash down below to sink those of us rolling above those transportation tunnels, thank you very much.

What we do need are more BRT routes and — thank you, SimCity — the Beijing monorail!

Swiss freeway stickers from 1985 through to 2006 (and counting)…

In particular, I remember that white 1988 one, that lime 1989 one, that orangey 1996 one, that fiendlishly-purple 1997 one, and that white 2000 one…