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Foreign Slackers Need Not Apply
We know image is everything for Mother China, but you don’t stab your friends so you can look tough to strangers. And that’s just what this tightened visa regulation gambit is doing. It’s telling all the affable dharma bums and free-wheeling Sinophiles who live here for love, not money, “Get a real job, or get out.” Just like our exasperated parents, whom many of us came to China to be as far away from as possible.
As of not-too-long ago, foreigners in China holding F & L visas will not be able to change them to other types. I know that’s a lot of dry legalese, so allow me to break it down. If you came to China to check things out and ended up staying because you like the place, you’re in trouble. You should have come here sponsored by a company, to create tangible value for the dragon’s consumption. No tangible value – no visa. Dragon eat you.500 yuan for each day overstay and up to thirty days in the clink.
Cynics who surmise that such rootless riff-raff comprise only a fraction of total expats in the Middle Kingdom should guess again. For every foreign boardroom warrior and hi-tech honcho treading this Yellow Earth, I’ll show you five big noses stressing their next rent payment, or planning a walkabout to Tibet. Call them what you will: vagabonds, 21st Century nomads, slackers. Here, we call them English teachers, although they call themselves consultants. Just don’t call them on making beer money with visitors’ visas. A foreign guest is much more than his net contribution to GDP.
An extended visitor to China who cares more about digging the scene than swelling a 401k has a lot to offer Mother China. She’s the one making friends with the locals and telling them how evil George Bush is. He’s the guy opening a café and increasing productivity as a corollary function of caffeine addiction. Still not convinced, Ministry of Public Security? Who do you think is going to ghost-write your kid’s Berkeley essay? Yeah, thought so.
Hey, nothing personal, government wonks who mandated this latest effort at making China as innocuous and standardized as a postcard of the Forbidden City. No one’s blaming you for going with the obvious and overlooking subtleties; your proficiency at doing so is why you have excelled at bureaucracy. But listen to sense. Ask who your real friends are: the kid studying Chinese and making a little grey area income, the same kid who will eventually be hogtied by an indomitable Chinese girl, who will in turn bear him fair-eyed happas with blood ties to the motherland? Or some six-figure carpet bagger who’s here on combat pay and can’t wait to go home?
If this has something to do with the Olympics, then for the sake of efficiency, reconsider. The average Beijinger can not possibly acquire enough English by next summer to direct a visitor to the nearest McDonalds, or explain why people are laughing at his green hat. Only foreign slackers will have that elusive combination of English, cross-cultural know how, and the free time to provide real-time translation and recommendation.
If this is about retribution for certain declining superpowers and their increasingly draconian visa policies, don’t play the game. We know you’re bigger than that. An eye for an eye leaves everybody blind.
Related posts:
- China’s Foreign Exchange Certificates: Ten Years Gone By
- Foreign Governments Getting Free Ride
- Rachel DeWoskin “Foreign Babes in Beijing”
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Man who stand on toilet is high on pot
“Call them what you will: vagabonds, 21st Century nomads, slackers. Here, we call them English teachers”
HAHAHAHAHA
What about accepting differences and at the same time: maintaining national integrity and specificity and being aware that once in a foreign country you just have to comply to that country’s rules and not sit on your bum doing nothing?
What about it? You go ahead and be an automaton; you’ll fit right in here. We’ll stand for the right of the individual to follow a self-determined path, not one dictated by narrow constricts of what’s productive and what ain’t.