May 29, 2021
D44: 庆城
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I was going to make the entry for today about visiting the county museum and getting a massage and stuff like the utterly shocking amount of money I paid for laundry service¹ because the high falutin place I'm staying is far too nice to have washing machines available for guests to use.
However, I responded to a comment in the last entry with a veritable essay on what's going on with No Foreigners Allowed and why it (mostly) isn't xenophobia, and—with some modification—I think it's as good an entry as any other.
Not allowing foreigners the freedom of movement is wrong on dozens of levels but it's also complicated and nuanced and not actually about not allowing foreigners the freedom of movement.
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Historically (and I'm going back about 400 years) foreigners were only allowed in very specific cities called Treaty Ports such as Beijing, Shanghai, Tianjin, and Guangzhou.
This changed by what is referred to as the "Century of Humiliation" with foreign penetration (mostly in the form of missionaries) into the deep countryside. At the time of the Boxer Rebellion there was some massive anti foreigner sentiment as well to the point of embassies being besieged.
Although most of the foreigners living in China prior to 1949 left with the establishment of the PRC, no one actually prohibited foreigners during the early years of Communist China. This was also a period when movement of any kind and for any person required a lot of documentation. Echoes of this are seen in registration software that, in addition to mandatory fields such as my name and passport number, often has fields for 'employer', 'job title', 'purpose of trip', 'permanent address', 'origin', 'destination', and the license plate number of the vehicle I arrived in.
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Reform and Opening Up started a bit over 40 years ago. At that time, the vast vast majority of 'foreigners' coming into the country were what are referred to as 'Overseas Returnees' (and they were most likely Visitors rather than Returnees). This is when the foreigner specific lodging regulations started.
There were earlier lodging regulations and restrictions but, as mentioned above, they didn't divide foreigners into a separate class.
For the most part, when Foreigner related regulations came into being they covered things like safety, security, and—most importantly—not looking like a impoverished country. To give an example: fire fighting equipment that wasn't legislated in hotels that could only take Chinese (even rich or politically connected ones), was an absolute requirement as part of getting a Foreigner License. Room size and minimum furnishing were also mandated.
It's important to remember that unlike restrictions that currently exist in politically sensitive areas such as Tibet this wasn't xenophobia or a way of controlling populations (either foreign or local) or their access to each other, but a way of "putting your best foot forward".
To hear the well to do Chinese born people who, after getting citizenship to other countries in the 80s, were visiting family in the 90s, Foreigner Hotels were a scam. Having actually read the regulations (because I'm a freak), I think it's more likely that the mandated facilities to make something a Foreigner Hotel weren't necessarily readily apparent to someone who wasn't paying attention.
A "Foreigner Hotel" wasn't restricted from taking Chinese but a hotel that wasn't licensed to take foreigners, couldn't. Furthermore, it's important to realize that being a "Foreigner Hotel" would actually increase business as it was a simple way to broadly advertise that your hotel is Officially Recognized as being "good enough" to have actual international guests.
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By the time I arrived in 2002, "Foreigner Hotels" were defined as anything ranked Chinese three star and above or International Youth Hostels. Hostels even had multi-bed dormitories and, unlike Russia (or other countries that have controlled the movement of foreign tourists within their borders), a dorm could be mixed in terms of citizenry.
The next year, the whole concept of a foreigner hotel as defined by law went away completely. It had been going away in dribs and drabs for the past 20 years but some document (that I have never found but which I have personal experience of) that came into effect with that year's National Day Holiday in October made the license which a hotel needed to take foreigners into a "business license".
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An important point to note is that China was only just shaking off the vestiges of an internal passport (called a hukou) being something with real teeth, so even though foreigners could stay everywhere, they still registered with the hotel and the hotel—if operating according to the law—still passed that registration on to the police the same as they would with a Chinese guest.
Passing the registration on to the police became more streamlined with a computer registration system that I first encountered in 2008. That first hotel being 8y a night with a thatch roof is a key part of my having done the research into the law and my being such a pain in the ass to authorities that insist that the place I've picked doesn't meet the minimum quality standards to be allowed foreigners.
I'm not exactly sure when I realized that Foreigner Hotels and new restrictions on foreigners tended to deliberately come from the local government (sometimes the police, sometimes the tourism board) but it wasn't a bike trip. This was the old concept of "putting your best foot forward" showing up along with some more insidious reasons such as not liking foreigners from "those countries" (mostly Africa and the Middle East).
However, the best (and worst) reason the police wanted to control the movement of foreigners came not out of a concern of who we might talk to, or what we might see, or even our personal safety, but out of concern for the police themselves. You see, if my bag (or bike) gets stolen and I'm the kind of loudmouth that insists on filing a police report, that gives the upper echelons of the police a very good reason to rain holy hellfire down upon the rank and file for doing a piss poor job at public security within their jurisdiction.
Since Beijing has explicitly said "foreigners can stay anywhere" and made a point (over the past almost 20 years) of continuing to not limit foreigners' ability to stay anywhere that is also legally allowed to take Chinese, the restrictions on where foreigners can and cannot stay are very local and also very carefully unwritten.
Separate from my being a cheap-ass when I'm touring, I refuse to accept being inconvenienced by unwritten rules.
Throw an often poorly programmed and regularly straight up broken (at least in terms of "edge cases" of being anything other than a Chinese citizen with a second generation ID card²) computer registration system into the mix, add a dash of Covid (meaning that every government at every level actually has gone back to caring about every traveler being logged) and you don't even need to cry "xenophobia" to get the current clusterfuck of No Foreigners Allowed.
Which is not to say that it's never xenophobia. Just that it's nuanced and complicated.
¹ Seriously, the amount I paid for laundry was damn near what I would have paid for a room and the right to use the washing machine at the other place.
²I've traveled with a Chinese citizen who didn't have a second generation ID card. His registration was even more painful than my own.
Today's ride: 5 km (3 miles)
Total: 1,583 km (983 miles)
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