As per Jackie’s suggestion, I feel I should share some insights into the inner workings of the propaganda machine here, having now worked as a part of it, but really there’s not much to say.  The long and the short of it that these people are all idiots.  I didn’t find it much different from working in New Oriental.  There, our team of people, each person uniquely unsuited for their job, worked blindly to make a crappy product that would never sell.  And even though it was a private enterprise, my coworkers were concerned with censoring the content to make sure nothing remotely bad was said about anything, either in China or elsewhere.  

The SOE was just the same, except that it didn’t matter if their products didn’t sell, since they were government funded whether their products sold or not.  The only motivating factor for anybody seemed to be their fear of being publicly scolded by the boss, or “leader,” as they all called her.  People generally didn’t talk about or admit to the fact that the enterprise’s publications were created to satisfy part of the country’s propaganda program.  In fact, our “leader” would vehemently insist that we were making products for the market, and that in U.S. high schools, there was a real demand for educational videos about how glorious Beijing has become and how fortunate the Uighurs are that China has developed out West.  I can’t tell if she really believed that or not.  A few months back, the enterprise held its annual meeting, which I was asked to attend for some reason, and the president said at one point that of course none of our products were going to sell — our publications weren’t for the market, they were just published to meet a state need.  But when we got back to the office, our boss continued to insist that there really was a market imperative behind what we were doing.

One day when my department went out for lunch, my boss asked me in front of everybody if I knew what the Communist Party is.  I just wish I could have gotten all these experiences on video.  Just unbelievable.

Looking forward, the visa situation is getting ugly.  Today I confirmed with my agent a rumor that no agents in Beijing are able to extend visas past September 15th.  He said that the government or PSB had imposed this restriction because of some foreigners who had obtained visa extensions in Beijing, went to Guangzhou and did something that got them arrested.  Also, like last year, this is another special year for China.  He said he thought the restrictions would relax after the national holiday in October.

I’m not sure what my plan is.  I was considering a trip to Indonesia to visit Seb, and apply for a new visa there, but I’ve heard I won’t be able to get anything longer than a 30 day single entry.  I may just wait until the end of May when my current visa expires, pay for an extension until September and hopefully find a real job by them.  Here is to optimism!

The last time I was going to write was just after Christmas, when me and my friends all got detained overnight in a police station.  I got about halfway through a very detailed and winding narrative of the night when I became distracted and then forgot what happened.

I think it’s mostly that writing frustrates me.  My life could be portrayed so much more vividly and entertainingly in documentary format.  Particularly because so much of anything I want to write is inspired out of discontent, which comes off as whining self-pity.  If I had a videocamera on me at all times, then the tragicomedy of my existence in China could be fully appreciated.

But since I don’t, I’ll try to keep this brief again.

Let me begin by proudly introducing MomaDVD.com, Beijing’s first online DVD rental service.  This was an idea that my friends Guy and Jeff came up with.  I programmed and designed the site, Jeff is taking care of marketing and other distasteful tasks, and Guy is allowing us both to bask in the magnificence of his wisdom and experience (he founded jipingmi.com, a cool Chinese real estate search site.)  The site is in its infancy right now, and hopefully we will get enough users and interest to warrant me putting more time into development.

Also, I am now working for the Reds.  The coworker I got along with the worst from my last job recommended me for this position at a Chinese state owned enterprise, presumably out of spite, although it is paying my bills again.  Most of my benefits come in the form of gifts of food: I received one box of vacuum sealed precooked meats, five plastic wrapped rolls of fresh precooked meat and a bag of salty fish, along with packages of nuts and chocolates for the Chinese New Year.  Two weeks ago I got a box of sixty eggs for my birthday.  My birthday is in March.

The job is in a multimedia publishing house subsidiary to China Central Radio & TV University.  They make propaganda that promotes glorious Chinese culture among Western imperialist nations, while assimilating and patronizing the cultures of non-Han ethnic minorities, the 56 flowers of diversity in China.  Did you know the Jews were once briefly officially recognized as a Chinese minority?  I can’t find a citation offhand, but somebody told me this, and I find it endlessly entertaining.

I’ve been working on a few projects since I joined them.  I played a foreign manager in an educational video series on Chinese Business Culture.  The thesis of the series, as I understand it, is essentially that Chinese are emotional and considerate but stupid, while Westerners are robotically professional and cold.  I fit right into the character and exploited my Chinese underlings with calculating gusto.

I am also responsible for translating and editing a Chinese children’s geography book into English scripts for a video series for American high school students.  According to the book, China is a paradise, especially the regions fortunate to have discovered coal, and the Japanese devils still have a serious blood debt to pay for past atrocities.  My boss assures me there is market demand for such a product.  My boss is a moron.

I volunteered to take charge of the development and design of the school’s English website, which has given me a chance to play around with Joomla!, which I enjoy.  I am saving them thousands of RMB and headache from contracting this out to a Chinese development firm, who would overcharge for a crappy custom made CMS and make them cripplingly dependent on the firm for any changes, but everybody seems upset by the fact that everything I’m using is free.  Open source sounds terrifyingly insecure, and the school will feel that we are shortchanging them if we don’t spend all of their budget on this thing.  I am too naive.  The customary thing to do would have been to take the budget and spend it on an imaginary company and software licenses and then just keep it to myself.  When will I learn.

The Labor Bureau has now made employment restrictions so tight that I am unable to renew my license through the normal channels.  The girl in HR found an agency who can obtain a Foreign Expert’s Certificate for me for a sum of 5,000 RMB, which will somehow circumvent the Labor Bureau, but the company will only offer to pay for half of this.  I can’t blame them, since I’ve given them no hint that I intend to stay in this job for any longer than I have to, but I find the concept of paying to work hard to swallow.  My boss assures me that I am a drop of water amidst a vast sea, and no one will notice if I trickle out.  My boss is a bitch.

I am very excited about an interview I’m having this Thursday with Exoweb.  I decided that since I find myself spending all of my time in front of a computer no matter what I do, I might as well do something I enjoy.  Guy told me about this company and said it is supposed to be a great place to work, although he also said they have something like a 1 in 500 hiring rate.  I made a demo video of the game I programmed a few years back to put in my portfolio.  See how smart I was:

Other things of note:

• I learned to snowboard.  It is awesome.
• Hubert is moving out to go backpacking through the Stans for a year with Karim.  This fills me with ambivalence.
• My ayi has terrible Chinese, and it takes her four hours to clean the apartment, a task that I could probably do in under two.  I want her to go away.
• Frisbee is starting up outdoors again, and in fact I got Tao, another frisbee player, to move into Hubert’s room.
• My brain completely ceased functioning about 20 seconds ago.  End post.

Despite my lack of creative impulse, things have been good.  I’ve been keeping afloat with a little bit of translating work for Greenpeace (see the PDFs), which fills me with a warm glow of self-righteousness and makes pandas shed tears of joy.  I’ve also been doing a little research into the possibility of realizing my long held dream of opening a bagel shop (and investors, I think this is a great opportunity for you.  A low risk alternative to the U.S. financial system, I think).  I should be moving into a nice new apartment with the French guys where I’ll finally have my own private bedroom at the end of this week, assuming the agent we’re using is only acting like an infuriating cheating lowlife scumbag and is, in fact, not.  And I just bought a roundtrip train ticket to Hong Kong next Thursday, where I’ll be going for a frisbee tournament for the weekend and picking up with a team from Manila.  The theme of the tournament party is “Enter the Dragon,” for which we were encouraged to do a performance where we display our “best kung fu style,” so I volunteered to do a little show, provided the girls on the team wear cheongsams and cheer.  This may or may not happen, but at any rate, I’ll pack my silks.

Meanwhile, we continue to enjoy beautiful blue skies almost every day, and it almost seems as if the Olympics never happened.

Nor have I seen Dr. Strangelove.

Nevertheless, it’s been such a long time and I wanted to write something about my job.  The reasons I haven’t written about it for so long are a mixture of respect for whatever nondisclosure terms might have been lurking in my contract, a fear of seeming disrespectful or disloyal to any potential future employers who might grace the pages of this blog, and mostly, the fact that my company’s website is so ridiculously awful and the content is so immensely stupid that it’s not even worth the space on this page to point it out.  I was also somewhat concerned that a coworker would stumble upon my site and I would be in trouble, except that a) my coworkers can’t really read English, and b) I kind of half want to get fired at this point.  So what merits this special occasion today?  Well, I just happen to be so numbed by the Olympics, the insipid circle-jerk of the media and its tumorous blogosphere, and the lack of any sensory input at my cubicle other than the near blinding glare off my furiously flickering CRT monitor, that I have no hope for any sort of mental stimulation other than to rant about my job.

Last year I did some research on the motivations driving journalists in China’s state media, and read an interesting paper on cognitive dissonance, and how journalists cope with conflicts between what they believe and what they are required to believe in order to succeed at their careers.  The paper presented a model with two spheres of discourse: public and private; and two ideologies: personal and state.  Journalists could then be classified into groups: those who expressed the state ideology in the public sphere but clung to their personal ideology in private, those who changed their personal ideology to conform with the state ideology in both spheres, and those who would sneak their personal ideology into the public sphere, etcetera etcetera.  This was a nice fancy way to understand journalists’ behavior, but did not really convey in a visceral way what exactly this “cognitive dissonance” feels like.

Now, having worked in this company for almost five months, I think I can say with confidence that now I know.

At this point, I could go into the details of each thing my company does that I am diametrically opposed to, but I think it should suffice to categorically state that everything we do is just wrong and destined to fail.

So what category of cognitive dissonance response do I fall into?  Well, to explain, I’d best go into at least a few details:  One of the biggest disagreements I’ve had with my boss is that I think the website’s forum is a waste of time.  I’ve told her over and over that the foreign internet is not like the Chinese internet.  You can’t just register a domain name like www.29858104.cn, throw up a forum, plagiarize some content and expect thousands of people to flock to your site and mindlessly bump your posts, bringing you instant fame and fortune.  We don’t even use forums anymore.  A forum is only useful if a website already has a thriving community tied by interest in the main function of the website — in our case, that would be providing audiovisual Chinese lessons.  So the goal should be to make the best lessons and website that we can, and then put the word out.  Then, maybe, if people like what we do and we gain a following, a forum would be useful for letting our users interact with us and each other, and helping us understand what our users think.  My boss, however, holds that the way to popularity is to plagiarize any good material we find from other websites into our forum.  Interested users will then supposedly stumble across our site and realize that we are the greatest thing since sliced bread, despite the fact that none of the content is our own, much of the website is functionally broken and plagued with Chinglish, the lessons are awful, and our logo is frightening enough to cause nightmares:

Despite differing views, I’d been keeping fairly positive and proactive in my job by offering suggestions and criticisms, maybe somehow believing that my boss and coworkers valued by opinion, but probably mostly just for the personal satisfaction to be gained by opposing idiocy.  But one message which has become clearer and clearer to me over the past few months is that my thoughts are not welcome here.  When my boss applied for my full employee status two months in, she filled out a report card giving me a full five points on every category except for “communication with others,” for which she gave me a two.  I’m extremely professional and talented, she explained, but I’m too blunt with my coworkers.  After all, as our Chinese lessons tell us, the Chinese people are very “mild and roundabout” in their manners, and as a crude and callous foreigner, I have much to learn.  So fine, I agreed, I would try my best to pay attention to this shortcoming.

Still, I insisted on arguing with my coworkers when disagreements arose.  But alas, when push comes to shove, I was, and still am, on the bottom rung of our team’s organizational chart.  After I first arrived, my boss sent an email around with a chart she had drawn up, in which my position was defined as “Foreign Teacher Editor,” reporting to the “English Manager,” who is Chinese.  Later, she drew up a new chart in which I was assigned the simpler role of “Foreign Teacher,” reporting to both the “Educational Development Manager” and the “Recording and Marketing Manager.”  Well, it turns out that neither the Educational Development Manager nor the Recording and Marketing Manager were very interested in arguing with me about anything, and two months ago, they took me aside for a meeting at which they essentially told me, in their ever-so mild and roundabout way, that they would appreciate it if I would argue less and follow orders more.

It was at this point that I was forced to take a different tack to cope with my cognitive dissonance.  It would be oversimplifying to say that I’ve fallen into the category of those who cope by disconnecting themselves from their work and reclaiming their personalities when they clock out.  That mostly describes my coping strategy, except for one twist.

About two weeks after my meeting with the two managers, my boss approached me on MSN and asked me to start taking responsibility for the forum.  She asked me, simply, to spend a few minutes each day finding material from other websites and pasting it into our forum.  Now, translating lesson texts and spewing out spiritless scripts for a failure of a website is one thing, but spending my energy on shameless plagiarism is quite another, and I refused.

This has proved to be a godsend.  Since then, nobody has approached me to do anything other than my regular drudgery.  They have since started some sort of content sharing agreement with a restaurant advertisement site and some toolbag who fancies himself a travel writer, by which they republish their excretions on our site, in exchange for what, I am not sure — and nobody has even so much as told me that they’re doing it.  It’s wonderful!  I have so much free time on my hands, I’ve done nothing today but write this post.

My poor, kindhearted American coworker, Caitlin (who is also at the bottom of our organizational chart, despite the fact that she has been with the company since the program’s inception), has not been so fortunate.  The team decided to use her likeness as the face behind the restaurant review section, which they titled “Dining with Cait,” and asked her to write a self-introduction about how much she loves Chinese food, as though she were the one writing the reviews, although the content is pasted from another website, and she has never been to any of the restaurants.  When Caitlin took issue with this abuse of her image, our boss suggested we could invent another character, say, Alice, and use some other random foreigner’s picture in her stead.  Caitlin then raised the hypothetical situation of what were we to do in the unlikely case that our website actually becomes successful and people want to meet Alice.  I think she suggested that Caitlin could pretend to be Alice.  Aside from the fact that Caitlin would probably not look very much like Alice, Caitlin is also one of the host teachers in our lessons, and begins every lesson by saying, “Hello and welcome to TargetChinese, I’m Caitlin!”  The concept of Alice was dropped and Caitlin’s face is still stuck on the website.

As for me, I think everybody’s happy that I’ve become a surly, passive automaton just like everybody in the tech department.  It’s what’s expected here.  I’m finally fitting into the culture — whether Chinese culture or corporate culture, far be it from me to say — and boy is it bliss.

China’s Communists, Resilient in Face of Change

A few hours later I found that the page had refreshed itself, inexplicably bearing a new title:

China’s Leaders Are Resilient in Face of Change

The second title is actually more fitting for the article itself, which is more informative and less colored than the first title would lead you to believe.  But I wonder what the explanation is for the title change.  Did it all of a sudden occur to some editor that “Oh yes, those pesky Communists are leading the country, aren’t they?  How inconvenient.”

On a related note, tomorrow is the opening ceremony of the Olympics, and in an unoriginal show of confused irony and ambivalence, I plan on wearing my I Heart China shirt.  Either that or an American flag;  I still haven’t decided.

Dreamy riot police, where are you now? (from www.telegraph.co.uk)

There was a crazy man on the subway during my commute this morning.  He sat across the car by the door and swore uncontrollably, punctuating the end of each string of curses with a tight swipe of his arm, as though he were smacking a child upside the head.  Then he would look around, half indignant and half afraid, and self-consciously stroke his long thin hair back behind his ear with the other hand.  As if suddenly remembering that the imaginary child hadn’t quite learned his lesson, he would then burst out with another barrage of cursing, and strike the air again with his palm.

This went on for at least ten minutes before I reached my stop.  Some people got nervous and went to other cars, and some people laughed at him openly.  Eventually one lady wearing a red security volunteer armband came by from the adjacent car and peered worriedly at the man.  People looked from the man to the lady, wondering if she would do something.  All the while the man kept cursing and making striking motions, and I couldn’t help but think of the guy on the bus in Canada who stabbed, decapitated, and ate a fellow passenger, and I wondered when Beijing’s strengthened police forces would finally show themselves, jump onto the train and subdue the poor bastard.

But the police never came and the lady in the red armband did nothing, and the man was still spitting and raving as I left.  What a disappointment.  If my tax dollars are going to go into all of this extra security for the Olympics, the least I can expect is instant and highly effective beatdowns at the first signs of disorder.

This was yesterday’s picture of the day on Telegraph.co.uk, taken at Crab Island, a beach resort area near Beijing.  Who is this guy?  He is my new hero.

Welcome, foreigner!

Although it’s been policy to require foreigners to register residency with their local PSB for a long time now, it’s probably only this year that the policy has grown some teeth, and the police have actually become insistent about enforcing it.  Just last week I found big white posters on the bulletin board by the gate of my apartment, and also on the doors to our units, marked with our police cartoon friend Jingjing (not to be confused with the Olympic panda mascot, whose name is spelled the same), giving us a friendly reminder to register at the local station for a temporary residence permit within 24 hours of the start of our stay.  And though personally so far I’ve been spared the intrusion, over the past several months I’ve been hearing stories from friends of friends who have had the police go door to door through their apartments asking to see foreigners’ registration and fining those without.

But what I just discovered, to my shock and awe, is that the PSB actually have our pictures in digital files on their network.  The other day, one of my housemates finally decided to transfer his registration from his old apartment to our place, and when he presented the rental lease to the policeman behind the desk, the policeman asked who his housemates were, and swiveled his monitor around to show him our files, complete with headshots.

I had heard that the PSB had networked their system a couple years back, but I had no idea that they scanned in our visa application photos!  I had assumed Chinese visa applications just got filed away to grow dust in some central storage, only to be retreived in extremely grave cases of political disobedience.  I am at once impressed and creeped out.  Anyhow, just something to consider when formulating white lies for upcoming visits to the PSB.

The tennis and badminton players each have a ball and birdie respectively dangling sadly by a wire from their rackets.  I’d guess the tennis player is not actually supposed to be holding a tennis racket; he’d look much more comfortable with a kendo sword in his hands.  And I think the rifleman is aiming with something that might have been picked off a construction site across the street.

Don't be "excessive" when helping handicapped people. The diagram shows how to say "Beijing Welcomes You" in sign language.

Today I happened across a new series of posters on the neighborhood propaganda bulletin boards about etiquette to be observed during the Olympics.  Olympics propaganda is not new to Beijing, nor are paternalistic slogans on how to be a “civilized” citizen, but this new series in particular caught my eye because of one poster with a list of rules for how to act around foreigners.  Always curious to understand more about Chinese behavior towards us Western folk, I stopped to take a closer look.  Most delightful was a list of eight questions Chinese are not to ask us, which if observed, would leave these curious and enthusiastic hosts with essentially nothing with which to make conversation.  Following are some translated excerpts along with photos from some of the posters:

Smile When Communicating with Foreigners

A Smile is Beijing’s Best Business Card — A Smile is the Whole World’s Propriety

“Eight Don’t-Asks” When Chatting with Foreign Guests

Rules for Interacting with Foreigners

Don’t ask about income or expenses, don’t ask about age, don’t ask about love life or marriage, don’t ask about health, don’t ask about someone’s home or address, don’t ask about personal experience, don’t ask about religious beliefs or political views, don’t ask what someone does.

General Rules for Etiquette with Foreigners

One’s manners and bearing, and image should be graceful;
Be neither humble nor haughty, but at ease and self possessed;
Seek commonalities while reserving differences, have reason and integrity;
Adapt to others’ customs, respect ethical code;
Abide by agreements, adhere to promises;
Be enthusiastic in moderation, differentiate between insiders and outsiders;
Be appropriately modest, be affirmed in yourself;
Do not ask private questions, respect others’ customs;
Ladies first, be gentlemanly;
Seat honored guests on the right, and get along harmoniously.

(The man in the lower-left bubble says: “This is Mr. Peter.”)

I’d say the highlight of this translation is the line “differentiate between insiders and outsiders,” neiwai youbie.  One online dictionary chose to translate this four-character phrase as “keep inside information from outsiders or foreigners,” which I suppose is also a valid interpretation for the more paranoid reader.

Also amusing were some of the guidelines for interacting with handicapped athletes:

Don't say bad things to handicapped people!

Etiquette for Interacting with Handicapped Athletes

1. You should use polite and standard forms of address for handicapped athletes.
2. Try to keep as light as you can with handicapped overtones.
3. Pay attention to how you congratulate handicapped athletes.

Pay attention to avoiding taboo subjects, quit using bad platitudes, and do not use insulting or discriminatory contemptuous or derogatory terms to address the disabled.  Say things such as, “You are amazing,” or “You are really great.”  When chatting with the visually impaired, do not say things like “It’s up ahead,” or “It’s over there.”  When chatting with athletes who are paraplectic in their upper body, do not say things like “It’s behind you.”

I’m not sure I understand the last tip; presumedly it’s cruel to tell someone something is behind them if their upper body is crippled.

Lastly, there was one rule on a poster about proper behavior for commuters and pedestrians that seemed a bit odd:

When men and women are walking together, men should generally walk on the outside, and the person carrying things should normally walk on the right.  Men should help women carry things, but must not help women carry their handbags.  When three people are walking side-by-side, elderly should walk in the middle.  Where there are many cars around, men should walk on the side of the sidewalk closer to the street.  When four people are walking together, it is best to walk two-by-two.

It sounds to me as if the people are being asked to mobilize into tactically advantageous walking formations, so as to maximize protection for women and elderly against rough and rowdy foreign hordes which will soon be threatening the safety of Beijing’s streets and sidewalks with unchecked groping and thieving.  To sum up, it seems the message behind these posters is “Smile, but don’t let the foreigners get close.”  Beijing welcomes you, indeed!