Don’t move!

This isn’t my command, but it does seem to be the message that the Chinese government is giving to its people.

During my first few years here I was mostly looking at China from the perspective of a foreigner. Now I am starting to get an idea of what China is like for the Chinese and there is quite a lot to dislike.

All the Chinese are registered as belonging to a family. Their registration documents include all the family members in one book, with their father as the head of the family. You are registered as belonging to your father’s home and you stay registered there until you get married and start a family of your own.

Going through any sort of paperwork in China can be a pain in the neck, and for that reason, along with many more, Chinese parents want their children to have their own permanent home before they get married. They don’t like the idea of people getting married if they are still renting, as they may need to move address and therefore go through the administrative nightmare of changing their registration documents, along with anything linked to those documents.

The cost of renting a two bedroom apartment in a reasonable part of Shenzhen is about 6 million rmb. The average monthly salary is 3000 rmb. Therefore the average person, if they spend nothing, needs to save up for nearly 200 years in order to buy a small apartment. Most modern buildings in China will deteriorate within a few years and be in ruins within 30 years. You don’t own the land, only part of the building. When it is knocked down you will be compensated part of the cost, but not all. Even in a cheap part of China, house prices are about 10,000 rmb per square meter. Saving up to buy an apartment here seems impossible for an average person.

Yet there is no real need to bother. the same 6 million rmb apartment can be rented for 4000 a month. You can rent the place for 100 years for less than the cost of buying it. Admittedly, you don’t own a home at the end of that 100 years, but the person buying will lose their home in less than half that time. When you add the way that Chinese laws seem to change every 5 years, there is no real stability for anyone. Renting, paying less and preserving your mobility seems like a good option to me.

However, without a spouse, a home and a family of your own, you are stuck belonging with your father. You can move somewhere else, but you will not be registered there.

There are still quite a few things in China that are subsidized by the government.If you work for the government you get a subsidy towards renting or buying a house and have most of your medical expenses covered, but only in your home town. There is also a government subsidy for everyone else to pay for the cost of renting or buying a property in your home town. but not if you move to another town.

As well as this, there are certain good quality, low cost rental properties in each town that are only available to people who are registered as living in that town. Again, due to government subsidy. It is much easier to move out of your parents’ home if you stay in your home town and don’t move.

By the time these people have earned enough money to pay for a government subsidized  home, in order to get married and start a family, they will be firmly settled in their career in their home town and will have no desire to move.

The Chinese are also obliged to spend every Spring Festival visiting their parents, on both sides of their family. This is a lot easier and less expensive if you have not moved far away from your home town.

The Chinese do not get free healthcare, so most of them pay for medical insurance. This will contribute towards the bulk of your medical costs, but once again, this is only in your home town. In Shenzhen it is not just required to be at a hospital in this city, but in your home district of the city. You can’t even go to a hospital across town.

If, like many young Chinese, you have gone to a big city to find work, you still need to travel home to go to the doctor, or the dentist, or else you will pay a lot more for your medical expenses.

If you are not married and want to change the city at which you are registered, the answer is usually no. You can’t.

I know several people for whom this has caused even more problems. Some of Crystal’s Chinese colleagues applied for visas to take students to America. Their visa applications were refused because their rental address and employer were in one province, but their registration card said they lived in another province. This made no sense to the people interviewing for the visa.

Despite making it so difficult for people to move, the government will sometimes create whole new cities and will remove all restriction on moving to that particular city. They may even require you to move there. When Shenzhen was being built, the top university graduates from across the country were offered incentives to move there and start a new life, with little option of saying no.

There seems to only be one class of people in China that I know of, who are free to change the city at which they are registered. People who studied overseas.

The Chinese government allows people who studied for further education overseas to move to wherever they want in China. Overseas in this case includes Hong Kong. (Another example of the way in which the Chinese government can’t make up their mind whether or not to treat Hong Kong as part of China). This is, nominally, so that they can put their skills to the best possible use. However, another reason is simply that the Chinese government doesn’t want them to move overseas.

Wherever you are in China the government has one simple message. Don’t move! Unless, of course, they want you to.

Truth is relative (or that is their excuse)

I have recently move to a new city in China, Shenzhen, and begun working for a new school, the Bao’an no.1 foreign language school.
The school is spread over two campuses and looks new, clean and quite attractive. I have heard that it is one of the best schools in the Bao’an district of Shenzhen and the best for foreign language study, so before arriving here I had high hopes.

I was a bit concerned when I was told that the teachers’ accommodation was in the high school campus, but that I would be teaching in the middle school, as the two campuses are about half an hour apart by car and an hour apart by public transport. There would be a bus to shuttle the teachers to the school in the morning and another to shuttle us back at the end of the day, with no real opportunity to come home and rest in between. The Chinese have a 2.5 hour lunch break, so that they can sleep at lunch time for a few hours, but without a shuttle bus at lunch time, there would barely be time to get to my apartment before I would need to return, so I would either be sleeping in the school office, or having a very long lunch break to wander around near the school.

The situation did not sound very appealing, but I was shown photos of the foreign teachers’ apartments and they seemed very nice (by Chinese standards) so I decided to accept the job offer.

A few months later I arrived in Shenzhen. After completing the training week with CITA, the agency I had got the job through, I and another seven teachers were introduced to some teachers from our new school and taken out to dinner with the school principle. After arriving at the restaurant we were kept waiting for over an hour for the principle to arrive. This should probably have been a good warning about how little they really care about us, but we were prepared to make allowances.

One of the teachers, a Spanish woman named Justy, had arranged to meet her brother later that evening. He was coming into Shenzhen from Hong Kong. He didn’t have a phone that he could use in the country and he had never been to China before. He was coming to Shenzhen to study Chinese. She had arranged to meet him at the Shenzhen Bay customs checkpoint at 7.30. We were initially meant to have met the representatives of the schools in the morning, but then it had been put back four hours, to the afternoon. This had messed up Justy’s plans. Since it was already after 6.00, we were an hour from the checkpoint and we were still waiting for the principle, Justy asked if she could go to meet her brother. She was told no. She was told that she had to stay. she was even told that she should go and meet her brother the next day instead! They expected her to leave her brother alone at the customs checkpoint with no phone, waiting a whole night for someone who would not turn up, just so that the principle could meet her. These people really did not care about us at all.
Fortunately Justy’s brother was able to get a wifi connection at the airport and was given the address of the school, so that he could try to get a taxi there, which was quite expensive, as it was at least an hour’s drive.

After the meal we were taken to the school campus and given our biggest disappointment yet. The campus was out in the middle of nowhere, on a street with no shops, houses or amenities of any kind. The accommodation block looked pretty new and nice from the outside, but the apartments were nothing like we had been shown. They were single rooms with hardly any furniture. There is a contractual obligation for them to provide a furnished apartment, with specific listed furnishings, most of which we did not have. My room had a new bed, but almost nothing else. A broken wardrobe with no rail for hanging clothes, no desk, no chair, no sofa, no drawers, no cupboards, no phone, no tv, no wifi, no internet.
The contract required a kitchen area with fridge, microwave, water cooler, gas stove, cooking utensils, cutlery, crockery etc. We have some of these: a fridge, a water fountain, a microwave, a single electric hot plate and one cooking pan. That is not a kitchen! The only sink, for both washing myself and for cooking, is out on the balcony. The tiny toilet is only accessible via the balcony. It has a shower hose above the toilet, but no space to hang a towel. To dry yourself, you need to come out onto the balcony, exposed to the road below, right above the turning area used for picking up and dropping off students. Given all the laws against public nudity in this country, I am pretty sure that it would be illegal for us to be seen naked on the balcony, but the school really has presented us with no alternative.
From the outset, I had told the school that my girlfriend would be living with me. They had provided a double bed, but only one pillow.
Unsurprisingly, nearly all the foreign teachers were livid. We had been lied to and tricked and where now getting completely shafted.
It is not that the rooms are so terrible. I have heard mixed reports from other CITA teachers. Some got lovely apartments, whilst others got tiny, dirty rooms with bed bugs and broken pipes. The rooms we were given are bigger than the student accommodation I had at university, but at university there were proper shared kitchens and dining rooms. We have nothing like that. The cooking facilities are completely useless and if we tried to build up a usable kitchen, it would take up much of the room and leave the bed and clothes stinking of anything that we cooked.
It is not just that the location is so remote that we need to walk half an hour to the nearest supermarket and have to wait an average of half an hour to get a bus for fifteen minutes, just to get to the nearest metro station, to allow us to have a one hour journey into the centre of town. The younger teachers are very upset about this. Two of the teachers like to go to the gym every day and asked if there is a gym nearby. They were told, yes. There is a gym nearby, at Bao’an stadium. By public transpoty it takes an hour to get to Bao’an stadium. The remote location is very frustrating, but at least the air is clear and the view is pretty.
What is most frustrating and annoying to me were the blatant lies used to get us here and the inability of the school to even prepare for our arrival. Last year the school had rented apartments off campus for the teachers. These were the apartments that we were shown. It was after saying that we would live on campus that we were shown the photos of the off campus apartments that we would definitely not be getting. The staff claim that they had told us the truth and that the pictures did show the foreign teachers’ apartments, but as they definitely knew we would not be living there, it is a feeble lie.
Then there is the fact that we were so unimportant to them that they couldn’t even bother furnishing the apartments (or prison cells) that they were giving us.
The school is government funded and all spending must be authorised by the local education ministry. We were told that the school had authorised funds for the rest of our furnishings, but that they are waiting on the government to authorise the spending, before they can buy anything.
I applied for the teaching job in February. In April I was interviewed by the director of this school and offered a place here. The other teachers were all being interviewed online during that same week. They had from April until September to get the funds authorised, but claim not to have had time. That is a lame excuse. They have just put it off, not considering us to be a priority worth thinking about until we were already here.
Our first night in our new homes, we felt like we were in a prison. We were left in our empty prison cells, in a locked, gated campus, with security guards sitting outside, watching our building, miles from anywhere. We would be shuttled from the prison cells to the work camp and then back again to our cells in the evening. The prospect of any sort of social life seemed extremely remote.

The only glimmer of light is that the CITA agency seem to be trying to help. The very next day they were at the school, trying to resolve our problems and seeing if they could arrange for better living conditions, or a more reasonable working arrangement. They have at least managed to save us the daily commute, by arranging for the native English speakers to teach at the high school and for the other teachers to live at the middle school. The middle school is a better location, with nearby shops, within walking distance of the metro, but the apartments are even smaller.