Portrait of an LBX

By Andy

I am still sitting in Shanghai nursing my wounds. A trip through the circus-like (but cheap) Chinese medical system last Thursday and Friday left me with a week’s supply of anti-inflammatory drugs, a two-week supply of some other pills that will supposedly help to regrow my cartilage (i.e. my degenerated menisci — I’m pretty sure the pills are just glucose and crushed seashells or something) and orders to rest for at least a week. For the benefit of family and other readers in the West who may not have had any exposure to the Chinese medical system, I’ll give a little overview of the experience. If you’ve been through it yourself there’s probably not much new in this post.

A little Interwebs research leads me to the Sir Run Run Shaw Hospital in Hangzhou, to which Evan is kind enough to accompany me (we figure his own experience with knee trouble and the Chinese medical system will be useful). I should preface this explanation by saying that my trip to the SRRC Hospital is the smoothest and least frustrating of my encounters with the Chinese medical system.

The hospital is massive compared to the others I have been to in this country. The first thing I notice upon walking into the lobby is that the place is clean, and no one is smoking — a relief after visiting my sister in a Sanya hospital where she was recuperating from an attack in a bar in which she had a couple beer bottles broken over her head. The main lobby consists of an information desk (where we are immediately given some incorrect information) and a row of ladies behind glass, resembling tellers at a bank. My only complaint about the SRRS Hospital (outside the dysfunctional medical system in which it operates) is that this row of ladies at computers acts as both the registration and payment center, which means everyone has to wait together to complete either task. Other hospitals I’ve been to separate these. (more…)

Jour 58 (18/11/09)

Shanghaï(上海)-Jiashan(嘉善)

Province du Zhejiang(浙江省)

-76km-

A peine levés, nous faisons nos adieux à Amir, Aaron et sa copine April, qui doivent sortir à leurs obligations (professionnelles ou autres). Je sors de mon sac de couchage et nettoie complètement mon vélo. Les Ricains, eux, l’ont déjà fait hier.

Lorsque nous partons, il est déjà 11h! Dehors, on se les pèle un peu. Après un rapide petit déjeuner mandarines-bananes, nous allons prendre un déjeuner hui, encore une fois dans un restaurant Lanzhou. Après nos train de vie des grandes villes, il va bien falloir limiter les dépenses!

Cathédrale Saint-Ignace (Xijiahui (徐家汇), Shanghaï), dessinée par un architecte anglais et construite par des Jésuites français, entre 1905 et 1910

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Jour 43 (04/11/09)

Suzhou(苏州)-Shanghaï(上海)

-91km-

Ce matin, on se lève pas trop tôt, car nous n’avons que 91km à faire. Ça devrait être du gâteau! Nous retournons à la bibliothèque pour nous connecter sur la toile, et prenons un petit déjeuner dit ‘à l’occidentale’, avec toast, salade, ainsi que des petits morceaux de tomates et de bananes recouverts d’un filet de mayonnaise!

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By Andy

I have a sense of relief about being back on the road, as if during a drunken slumber in Shanghai the road itself seeped into my blood and my bike somehow became another limb. Already, our two weeks of relative luxury in Shanghai’s French Concession area seem like a distant memory, though today we have ventured only a relatively short 76km from where we awoke and said goodbye to our hosts.

The road feels familiar, like climbing back into bed with a lover after a prolonged period apart. As a result of yesterday’s cleaning and maintenance, my bike glides across the pavement, each push on a pedal propelling me away from the big city and toward the hinterland where we belong.  The memory of our final push into Shanghai, gears and chains grinding, clogged with the dust and grit of the North China Plain, makes me cringe.

I have never biked out of an American city before, but the experience of biking out of a Chinese city is nearly always the same. Tall, somewhat closely packed skyscrapers give way to endless expanses of high-rise apartments that become shabbier and more insalubrious as we move way from “civilization.” Eventually, the apartment complexes are replaced by ramshackle luxury villas, constructed, exactly like their high-rise counterparts, of substandard concrete and steel, but located basically in the middle of nowhere with no convenient public transportation options to speak of. Porsche SUVs sit in identical driveways, looking shiny and new next to identical houses with grimy, peeling paint. Then the middle of nowhere itself arrives. The occasional, half-complete high-rise complex still protrudes from the dark soil, likely the result of a land grab and sale by unscrupulous local officials looking to supplement scarce tax revenue out in the boonies. Farmers, whose houses may once have sat where the apartments are now rising, tend to patches of vegetables still planted in the shadow of the new high-rises. Occasionally, a patch of putrid air from a factory no longer permitted to operate within the city limits hits me full on. I turn my head, suck in a deep breath, and hold it until the factory is gone.

Finally, we are out. (more…)

By Andy

Quiet streets near our temporary home in Shanghai's former French Concession area

After three years in Beijing, I feel like I have never seen so much rain in my life.  It has come in drizzles, spurts and torrential downpours. We are certainly no longer in the desert that is northern China, but it seems strange to consider ourselves in the south as well. Maybe that’s just the temperature speaking – if it doesn’t pop above ten degrees Celsius tomorrow, they’re going to declare that winter has begun, which will make for the earliest winter in the past decade for Shanghai. The forecast for tomorrow calls for snow. I’ve broken down and bought a hat, gloves (waterproof) and a warm fleece pullover.

We had originally intended to spend a week here resting and recuperating, but the rain has stretched this to nearly two already, and according to the forecast it shows no sign of letting up until Sunday. So we’ve been holed up in what are at least very comfortable surroundings in a two-bedroom apartment in the former French Concession, of which I have become quite enamored. Instead of the wide (sometimes as wide as ten lanes!) boulevards of Beijing, bulging at the seams with traffic and constantly undulating with an almost unfathomable mass of humanity, we have found ourselves walking unencumbered down narrow, tree-lined alleys. The area is quiet – almost serene in comparison to the horn-blowing, hawking, yelling messes we navigate anytime we pass through anyplace remotely urban elsewhere. Most importantly, the place is livable – we have a number of friends living in the area, and nearly everything is walkable if one has a little time to put into it. In short, it is a place to which I would gladly return were I to spend additional time in China after this trip – which is not necessarily guaranteed.

Relatively empty sidewalks with Chinese characteristics

Shanghai is the financial capital of Mainland China, and like most places with such an epithet, the place is expensive. We’ve been blowing through money like we’re fighting simultaneous wars in Iraq and Afghanistan – except we can’t borrow from the People’s Bank of China or ask Geithner to just keep the printing presses running. Our original projection for the trip called for us to average about $14 per day, which is starting to look laughable, despite our free lodging provided by an extremely generous friend and former coworker of Evan’s. In addition to a healthy dose of rest, we’ve had our fill of catching up with old friends and enjoying the luxuries that only a metropolis can offer in China: microbrews, coffee and free wifi.

Nevertheless, the idleness is beginning to wear on us to the extent that we are reaching a breaking point. A communication failure early on and a mix of varying assumptions have left us all at varying levels of waterproof-ness. We will try to correct as much of that is possible tomorrow morning with a trip to a sporting goods store, and unless the weather is truly unbearable, we are going to attempt to hack it in the rain. For anyone following our trip for the cycling aspect, we will undoubtedly have some valuable information on the subject of waterproofing soon.

Stay tuned.

It’s about time for a follow up on the post about my friend Ms. Li and her hukou application, which has been submitted for over 4 months to date. Now as winter is beginning its southward creep over China, it seems that Ms. Li and her husband’s dream of becoming full citizens in the city of their choice is withering like the leaves. Though the government has given them no official response (as it is wont to do), traditionally being stone-walled for this long means that their application has fallen into a black hole of bureaucracy, not to be seen or heard from again unless they feel like redoing the whole process again next year – if, of course, her husband’s SOE is still willing to exert the effort to sponsor an application. So next year they’ll be heading to the housing registration bureau to renew their housing permits just like every other Zhang, Wang, and Li from somewhere else. But hey, it could be worse – they could have been born minorities.

The last post introduced you to the hukou system.  Now it’s time to get to a case in point.  It begins with a friend of mine who hails from Anhui province (think West Virginia), a place known for its beauty but also widely considered irreconcilably backward and poor. How poor is it?  When I meet an LBX doing menial labor in Shanghai, I usually just ask where in Anhui he or she comes and wait for the exasperated “how did you know?”

Nevertheless, there does exist a white-collar contingency in Anhui, of which my friend, who we’ll call Ms. Li just in case, is one. Since leaving Anhui, Ms. Li’s life has been punctuated by abrupt changes and adaptations, but being resilient, she’s managed to keep her head above water. Recently, her immediate future was solidified by a rushed marriage to a very well educated ex-diplomatic service officer, who, having become fed up with working in the foreign service, moved to Shanghai and to work for a gargantuan state-owned enterprise (SOE).

Why is her marriage to this man of letters relevant, you ask? It is important because his employment has put him in a decent position to apply for a Shanghai hukou (pronounced hoo koh), or what could be called, for all intents and purposes, “Shanghai citizenship.”

Hold the phone. Aren’t they already Chinese citizens? (more…)

This weekend as I watched an episode of Planet Earth, I noticed that David Attenborough began each segment by describing a new environment and the specific advantages or disadvantages it poses to life, after which he introduced the wildlife found there in terms relating to this environment. It occurred to me as an effective sequence for introducing the layman to strange creatures as they relate to their own extraordinary habitats which the audience might otherwise have trouble comprehending at first glance. Analogously, this post will hopefully help describe part of the unfamiliar LBX environment in order to orient our readers, who otherwise might have difficulty taking in the larger picture all at once.

Today it’s not sulphur rich ocean water surrounding underwater volcanoes, but rather the hukou registration system in which all mainland Chinese exist – LBXes included.  The hukou (户口), or household registration system, is essentially the manner in which the Chinese government divides up its citizens.  The majority of the population possesses a peasant (农民) registration, and the remainder possesses a non-peasant (非农), or, by extension, urban registration.  Since the rural reforms of 1978, peasant families are all allocated a plot of land on which to farm, and from that land to pay grain taxes.  Non-peasants are all divided into work units (单位) – the ostensible determination for what their occupation will be – are given no land, and are legal residents of cities or towns.[1] The distinctions are passed patrilineally to children, but there are a few methods by which a Chinese citizen born as a peasant can obtain a non-peasant hukou.[2]

These will be discussed in a later article.

The process by which a Chinese citizen with a peasant hukou becomes an urban resident, or Nongzhuanfei (农转非), can be compared to the immigration system in the US, with the exception that in the Chinese situation, the “immigrants” are already citizens, but institutionally regarded as second class once they breach the city limits.  In most cases those who qualify for Nongzhuanfei are of use to the state: students graduating from institutions of higher education, technicians recruited for industry, or local administrators chosen for promotion to senior administrative positions.[3] Since 1985, however, peasants have been allowed to legally reside in places other than where they are officially registered by obtaining a temporary residency permit.  This has resulted in the a colossal outflow of peasants from their places of birth into urban centers.[4]

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