Exciting though it may be to have my blog blocked by the Chinese media censors, this is hardly my first run-in with the authorities here. Last summer, I taught middle school English in Xiantao, a small city in central China. I worked with seven other Americans, and we had been teaching for a week when the police showed up at the school and had a chat with us. Perhaps, they suggested, they might find some trouble with our visas, unless we offered up a bribe of 20,000 RMB - about $2,500.
Students that we were, we gagged on the numbers and dashed off to pack our bags. Quite out of nowhere, however, the bribe came sailing in from our wealthy boss in Hangzhou, and the police went away.
For three days.
That's when the cops showed up again, this time looking serious, pulled each of us away from our classrooms and sat us down across the table. The chief of police sat back in his chair, looking smug, while his English translator stared us down and launched into her tirade.
"You have all obeyed the People's Republic of China," she began. Snickers from her audience prompted repetition: "You have all obeyed the People's Republic of China!" she thundered. We just stared at her, struggling to suppress our laughter. Without acknowledging her mistake, she continued, reading from some little red book.
The charges were bogus - they had invented a few problems with our passports - but there was not much to be done: In small-city China, the police are in charge, and that is the way it goes. We were encouraged to find our way out of the city, and never find our way back. We obliged and the next morning, we were on the bus out of town.
The real reasons we were kicked out were never completely clear. My vague understanding, as described by our liaison and supervisor, is that we were the innocent rope in a political tug-of-war between the local Communist party cadre and our wealthy boss in Hangzhou. Our expulsion was just one small way that the cadre could flex her political muscle and lash out at the wealthy businessperson, our boss, her rival.
This struggle was in some ways a microcosm of tension that exists today between China's old Communist-era institutions and the capitalistic forces that have been on the rise for the past 25 years. The good news - for the Chinese people and for American English teachers, at least - is that the capitalists are winning.
I sat in a Beijing taxicab recently, trying to finish a column for this illustrious page, but found myself distracted - not by the Beijing traffic that whizzed by a few feet from my face, threatening to end my life, but by the TV screen installed in the back of the headrest in front of me. Blonde women, clad in their underwear, paraded up and down the runway on the screen, exhibiting the new season's trends in the Chinese fashion world.
I didn't get much done.
Absurd extravagances are becoming more and more common in China today - and they go beyond TV screens in taxicabs. At the heart of Beijing, foreign tourists and local Beijingers alike flock to Wangfujing shopping street, a shrine to capitalism, where Kobe Bryant, looking down from a massive billboard, watches droves of shoppers pay exorbitant prices for just about everything. And that's just the surface of it.
China's economy, as you may have heard, has hit its growth spurt. Never in history has a country so massive made such a tremendous leap so quickly. Indeed, it is as though China is jumping from the 19th century into the 21st century, and doing so in a quarter of the time.
We have all read the numbers: 12 percent growth, $1 trillion in foreign capital reserves, a 40 percent savings rate. China has been doing well and isn't showing any signs of slowing down. The outdated political and legal system of the country, however - as exemplified by my run-in with the fuzz last summer - has the potential to be a ball and chain on the economy here.
Laws in China are often vague, inefficient, redundant, contradictory and sometimes not all that helpful. The same goes for China's massive governmental bureaucracy. Foreign investment is liable to level off sooner than later if a more favorable legal system isn't built. So it is only a matter of time before the leadership in Beijing rips apart and rebuilds the legal system and restructures their bureaucracy in a way that it can help, rather than hinder, private enterprise.
In the meanwhile, I am just hoping to keep my head below the radar and not infuriate too many more party officials.
Sam duPont is a junior studying Chinese in Beijing. To read more about his adventures, visit his blog: redskyatnight.blogspot.com
