China Again!

When I went to China recently (again), I already knew several of the guys there, and so the conversations were a bit more open. Plus, the weather was good (unlike last time), so I walked around a lot and noticed a lot of things.

Women in mini-skirts are very common; and remarkably, like in Western societies, nobody stops and stares at them. In fact, they even feel safe enough to get into cabs (alone) at 9 or 10 in the night!

A lady Chinese colleague told us, “It is ok to hug (male) foreigners, but not each other”. Even brown foreigners! When asked why they don’t hug each other, I liked my colleague’s response: “We Chinese don’t have affairs”.

At the town square in Wuxi (I’m sure you’ve never heard of the place, which is what makes what follows even more surprising), you can find couples of all ages, young and old, doing ball room dancing for fun! If it happens in an unknown place like Wuxi, I am guessing such things can’t be all that uncommon in China.

Most people can’t speak (or understand) English at all. Some of them can converse with each other, but with us, the accent problem makes it impossible. At the business hotel we stayed in, a place frequented by foreigners, the concierge didn’t know what the word “newspaper” meant! Imagine that. And yet, cab drivers don’t rip you off just because you are a foreigner and can’t speak a word of their language. Is it because their police system works, I don’t know.

Another thing in common with the West is that their school education is free (and you have to send your kid to the neighborhood school). Everyone gets hospital insurance; but it works only in your town of residence. In other places, you have to pay from your pocket, and then get the bill reimbursed in your own town. But my colleague says they are moving to centralize that system.

Seeing our reaction to such things, my host said, “We are a decade or two ahead of you guys”. He wasn’t jeering; just stating a matter of fact. It hurt, but it is true.

Every brand in the supermarket is a brand we’d never heard of: this is a big problem because we couldn’t even recognize a product by its logo! The only exceptions seem to be Coca Cola, Apple and Volkswagon.

The infamous “one child policy” is being changed as China’s under threat of there being too many old people in next couple of decades. Now, if at least one of the parents is an only child, the couple can have two kids.

As I said after my last trip, there’s no Google, no Facebook and no Twitter; only Chinese variants for the same. And that is why VPN’s (a mechanism to encrypt your data, usually only used by corporations in the rest of the world) are not an uncommon buy in China. Using a VPN, you can access such forbidden sites like Google, Facebook and Twitter.

People seem to feel free to talk even on about seemingly controversial topics. Like the time a colleague said that China has 31 or 30 provinces (states), depending on whom you ask. Curious? Depends on whether or not you include Taiwan! I got the feeling people are free to talk; but never to publicly dissent against the government. And the term “public” includes via the Internet. They also don’t seem to care about communism: “We’re getting richer anyway, so who cares?” seems to be the refrain.

That last part aligns with why almost nobody (inside or outside China) believes that China will ever have a revolution: there’s just too much to lose for everyone.