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mafia and local government

A story told to me by a source that has first hand knowledge of the situation:

The local government official responsible for the development of the land in our development zone my employer's factory is in decided that a piece of land between my employer's factory and the highway should be developed. At the time the land was owned and cultivated by a farmer. The government offered to buy the land, but the farmer said it was not enough (I'm not starting to guess if the requirements were fair, or exorbitant, but there have been riots around China for similar land acquisitions). The local government wants to develop the land and sell its use to a private individual to build a mall, or retail market of some kind. So since the government couldn't get the farmer to leave they called their friends in the local mafia. The local mafia said they would make the farmers move, however the government had to let the mafia do the grading and filling of the land. The land is quite low and soft so needed to be filled to the same level as the adjacent highway. The local government agreed to give the mafia the grading and filling contract without competition. So using intimidation and threats the mafia got the farmer to move. Then the mafia started filling the land. The problem is that the original agreement was to fill the land to the level of the highway, requiring about 40,000 cubic meters costing about 20 RMB/cubic meter, which my source said is already a better than normal price. Now the fill is complete and the mafia told the government that they had instead filled 80,000 meters of soil creating a increase in the cost including of 1,000,000 RMB (including fees in addition to the soil cost). So now the government is really having a tough time because they have to come up with the extra (taxpayer's) money to pay the difference. There are also questions of if the soil that was used to fill it is actually good soil suitable for building on.

This is especially interesting to me, not because of the proximity to our factory, but becuase I understand that years back there was some trouble acquiring this land. Nowadays we are greeted as we walk into the front door of the factory and in several office with a wavy floors, and huge cracks in the walls of this three year old factory. I wonder what kind of foundation I'm sitting on.

mystery berries are good

Does anyone know what the name of this berry is, in Mandarin Chinese or English? Erwin, Ray, Xiao Lin and I went for a drive in the country last weekend to check out some cliffs and found some berries and bamboo roots do dig as well. All I've heard is the name in the local dialect that doesn't translate directly into Mandarin, or at least the characters don't. It's like a cross between blackberries and raspberries.

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Lots'o'stamps

Seems my Myspace blog isn't blocked all of the time, just most of the time.

So I got to spend the night in my own bed for two nights in a row as of last night, it is nice. The past two weeks have been spent traveling up and down the coast here, but it's not all for work. Two weekends ago on Saturday night I went down to Xianju, about an hour and a half west of Taizhou into the mountains when I got off work on Saturday and spent Sunday hiking. I had meetings the next day in Taizhou so it was convenient, and who would have thought it was so close.

The mountains reminded me of Guiling, just sheer cliffs and spires with lots of clear waterfalls. The heat was intense, but it scared away most of the tourists (less people for me to make a scene with about littering the place they are touring) and the plenty of opportunites to swim the small, deep pools below the waterfalls. I discovered that opening my eyes in the crystal clear water was painless and hardly uncomfortable at all. At a small man-made pond I took a dive in one of the local custodians came out and told me that the fine was 50 for swimming ("there's no sign" I said) but if she didn't call the police it would only be 10. She didn't appreciate the laughter and for some reason the cop never showed (who I would've paid). A major cultural difference I have had a hard time getting over is people that go to beautiful places to tour and through their trash everywhere because they think the cleaners will come around. I've concluded that Mao, with his infamous efforts wasn't quite able to take the emporer out of Chinese culture.


Last weekend I had to go to the Shenzhen area on Friday and Saturday morning so on Saturday afternoon we went over to Hong Kong to tour the city. My previous visits were so hectic that I wasn't able to see much but this was more relaxed. I can understand why so many foreigners like to live there. It's very clean, has (so important) lots of mountains, and incredibly dense. I feel like I'm in Shanghai's busiest subway station just walking down the street. That evening we went up to the top of the mountain on Hong Kong Island where the high rollers live and looked out over the hay like city skyline.
On Sunday two colleagues and I went to Ocean Park, which is similar to Sea World, or I'm told. Equipped with several large aqariums, porpoise and seal shows, pandas (thrown in because this is China, not because they live anywhere near the ocean) and a few thrill rides. The Brits really did a good job there.

New bike frame, interesting weekend.

I took the early morning train to Shanghai Saturday morning, and arrived at Specialized's first bike shop in China around noon. We took some PR photos of the exchange and started putting the box of parts I had brought onto the new frame. I could have been able to get the parts onto the bike within the two hour window, but because of a few key parts the store didn't have in yet I needed to go the a shop down the street. When my friends that had planned to stay at my apartment in Fenghua Saturday night to go climbing Sunday said they wouldn't come to down until Sunday morning I decided to take a later train. The bike was assembled well and after dealing with so many horrible hammer-happy bike mechanics in China I was really happy to see their mechanic really knew what he was doing. I somehow made my way through the incredibly dense subway rush-hour crowds back to the Shanghai train station.
Another lesson learned. Train tickets can only be changed (switched time or destnation) within four hours of after the trains leaves. You get a certain part off your price at two, and another at four. So I arrived about 4.5 hours later and had to buy a new ticket. Still I was pretty happy to get a soft seat in a relatively empty car. The only thing that kept me from falling asleep immediately was listening to the guys in the seats across the ilse (sp? I know it's wrong) talk about me. After rebuffing their questions with puzzled shrugs so I could sleep I let them in on it when I got off the train.

I had the same incident happen again with the taxi driver at the train station. Maybe I can paste this into my blog. I got into the cab and a moment later it got boxed in and some guy casually walked up and grabbed the ID out of the guys card holder on the dash. The driver was calmer but ofcourse immediately got out and tried to get it out. A really big crowd gathered and the people involved started trying to get me and my bike out of the cab. My bike frame and wheels were in the back seat and I was fully prepared to turn my bike into the jawbone Samson used, but was a little concerned since there was quite a crowd. So even the friendly driver started telling me I needed to get out so I called the police 110. The driver said I needed to take another cab and I was starting to understand the situation, and really really dislike the Ningbo cabs, or thugs that were patrolling the area. Still I didn't want to give up the cab since it was close to midnight and this was the second cab I had called. The first driver couldn't speak any Mandarin and I finally told him I wanted another cab.

For the blog I should explain how I find the cab. Whenever I want a ride back from Ningbo to Fenghua I dial the Ningbo area taxi hotline, 13777111333. I tell them where I am and where I want to go, they find a driver from the area you want to go, such as Fenghua, and connect me to the driver so we can arrange pickup location etc. Lately I've been telling the operator at the taxi service that I need a driver that can speak Mandarin and usually we'll have a three way call or I can send text messages to the drivers. So I regularly, and I believe legally regularly use these cabs.

So the police shows up and I feel a little safer among the large crowd. The cop baby-talks clear Mandarin Chinese to me, it was ridiculously slow and explains that Fenghua cabs can't do business in Ningbo, I have to take a Ningbo cab back. So thinking how ridiculous it was I asked "So the Ningbo cabs can do business in Fenghua but the Fenghua cabs can't do business in Ningbo?" The answer was "yes". I said, "If I used a Ningbo cab to take me back it would cost 90, but a Fenghua cab was only 30", his response was "this is a government rule, not mine". Then I asked, "If I used a Fenghua cab to get to Ningbo couldn't he take me back?" His ambiguous answer was, "yes, that's okay." In the process I called another friend who has lived in Ningbo for a few years and he said he didn't know this. So a few of the Ningbo cab drivers actually had the audacity to walk up and offer to take me to Fenghua, that was a situation in which it was good I don't know any really bad language, though I think I communicated my disgust. So the driver said he just couldn't pick me up near the trains station, he'd pick me up a few blocks away. So I rode a few blocks away, but the driver didn't seem to know where I was and in the midst of a few phone calls a Ningbo driver showed up who must have seen the scene who lived in Fenghua and offered me the same rate and I took it. Sorry Mr. Fenghua driver.

Lesson learned, call a cab from the big intersection down the street from the train station, and ask the operator if I the driver can speak Mandarin. This could have saved me hours in the past couple months.

The next morning a group of 9 guys and girls from an outdoor club arrived at the Fenghua train station. They decided the day before we would look at a tall summit cliff south of my office instead of going to bluff in Xikou. It was incredibly hot already so I was mostly concerned with having some convenient swimming, something both locations had. So we took a bus and I biked to Xiwu, picked up Xiao Si (the younger of the engineers in my dept) and headed in a taxi truck to the trail head. The only hang up is I know how to get there on foot quite well, but getting there in a vehicle requires navigating through a dense little town and figuring out how to get up onto the new railroad line where the trail starts. Finally at 10:30 we started hiking. After hearing so many "it's too dangerous" from so many sources for so many ridiculous reasons it was really refreshing not have a group of people that didn't take constant pulling. I took my machete and two of us carried big packs of climbing gear. This trail is very steep, I haven't looked at the GPS data closely, but it climbs about 400m in a hurry so I was kinda wishing the others would be a little easier to tire as my head swam at the front of the group. When I got to the top I had drank 2.5 liters of water in about 1 hour. Despite the machete the first through the trail got thrashed by the summer foliage, but the wind and view was wonderful. It was also nice to see a group that was just interested in going out doors and having fun. A few carried grocery bags of food and cooked some noodles on a small stove at the top. Still I hardly heard a complaint the whole time.

We got down from the mountain and my shorting out sweat soaked cell phone managed to transmit the message that I needed to get back to the office about 4km away to look at a container that was about to go out. It was Sunday afternoon so I wasn't about to apologize, but found it amusing walking around seeing GM and a few others while completely filthy, bloody, and drenched in sweat. I rode my bike to the lake that was about 2km from the mt trail carrying 20 bottles of tea, coke and water and immediately jumped in. Carrying all that stuff on my bike in weather close to 100 was as close as I've come to fainting from heat in years. I turned around and saw that the others were still standing on the dam and someone was obviously telling them they couldn't swim. I chose to ignore them and swam to another bank where I met them and was told that swimming wasn't allowed there. (I've been swimming there a few times a week for a couple of months). We called the truck/cab from that morning and he met us in the small town below the dam, but after me prodding them and pointing out that there were others on the other side of the lake we drove around and finally all jumped in. We managed to swim for about an hour and a few made some good progress in their swimming before the same guy made his way back around the lake. He wasn't too rude about it, but basically swimming is considered a very dangerous thing in China (China's first Ironman triathlon was canceled a month before its start for the same safety concern) and they didn't want any dead people floating in the water supply. I enjoy mocking these bureaucrat's' "concern" for our health and welfare especially when looking at dangers elsewhere. So we, including the cab driver, got a good swim and some lessons before we got called in. I amused myself debating it with the guy, telling him I had showered first (he I should as the goats grazed on the lake's bank). I pointed out that if the typhoon came they people I was obviously giving swimming lessons to would drown, but since we could swim here they'd be safe. There were so many laughable points but I'll cut off this epic blog here.

general update

So I'm still trying to blog more regularly. I think I should start copying emails and posting on here. I type more story a couple of times in emails, realize it isn't that interesting anyway and don't think to write a blog entry.

So since I wrote the venting blog about the senior coworker (no, he's not Spanish) he's been demoted to only be managing his department. His third engineer since I got here almost ten months ago started working for him a couple of weeks ago. In the space between the new one and the old one he needed some CAD work done so I was able to get some work out of him in the trade. My two engineers are really working well and we seem to get along really well. I'm proud of them, but I get pretty pissed when the GM doesn't show up for or cancels meetings well all crunch for and take very seriously. We've been in a perpetual "the meeting is moved to this afternoon, moved to tomorrow..." cycle for about a week and a half now. This morning we finally had our meeting and the GM didn't even show up to work until 10, an hour after we were supposed to have the meeting. The good thing is I'm pretty confident that we're doing good work and this obvious breech in professionalism is enough that I a little more blunt and forceful now.

The meeting went well, the only thing that made my blood pressure rise was when the GM's wife came in and started saying "that part (a major component to an assembly) looks to big, it doesn’t look like a set". She was making observation based on a rough prototype that wasn't even assembled. We're cutting steel on this mold tomorrow, so the timing as well what she was saying was so absolutely absurd I had a hard time not laughing, at least I wasn't fuming like the last time she decided to insert her opinion at the last minute. The second thing was a technician was called in about a question regarding a rivet's compression. He answered the question and started critiquing the project's details, a product he's never even seen before. It was kinda funny because it was so much like an old tech at Marshalltown that used to do the same thing, but it was the first time that I told someone to "quickly leave" a meeting here. It was amusing.

A Spanish company that I interviewed with last winter but didn't accept the offer has approached me again this time about a more of a management position as they prepare to introduce their products into China for domestic sales. They don't have a huge brand, mostly OEM/ODM, but they seem to have their sourcing down, going all over Asia, and I really like the guy (about my age) I'd be working with. And the possibility of living/working in Barcelona, though mostly here is pretty exciting. We'll talk more seriously in a few weeks. I'm not going to disappear from Shijia, but if I don't get the commission promised and the attention we need to efficiently complete my projects (it's to the point of being rude) I'm going to negotiate an early departure. A secondary concern is that I really like the two guys working for me and would like change jobs as a team if possible. We're working together well, making good infrastructure progress to help stuff later on work fast, and doing projects that the I've never seen any other people do here.

Another option is another company in Fenghua has been tempting me about a project manager role for a new line they want to develop. The manager (maybe VP) Chris, I'd be working for is an American friend a few years older than me with whom I really enjoy discussing the issues we meet from day to day, personally and professionally. He has an MBA as well so it's really nice to bounce ideas off of him since there is a huge management vacuum here I get faced with this kind of problems all the time.

I'm sadly still bike less! I might be borrowing a bike from Rock for a race this weekend that I'm sure will go terrible, but it'll be fun to go, see the city and friends anyway. I've got to figure out how to post his grotesque video of his road rash from his wreck last weekend. I might have written about the incredible switchbacks here. The Specialized bike shop in Shanghai is saying my new frame is stuck in customs, but, for the past week and a half, should be out anytime. It's going to be great to get it back. Cycling and swimming (and I need my bike to get to the lake in this heat) are the only outdoor activities I can tolerate in this heat over 40 (100+) today.