I have inadvertently discovered a new technique for effectively dealing with the Chinese police. I'd encountered this technique before (most notably back in 2018 on the day of the Incident) but I've now used it on enough occasions to confirm that it absolutely works.

And, unlike many of my other favorite techniques (such as authoritatively lecturing them or being unusually cooperative while grinning at them in an unsettling way) you don't even need to be fluent in Chinese.

You do, however, need to be short about four hours of sleep.

My Form was, once again, a brilliant success with the hotelier. He was fine with just photographing it but I was all "how about you take it so if the police want it, you've got a physical item to give them" and, come morning, when the police checked round about last night's guests in a fashion that I really really really need to find out whether or not was at all standard operating procedure at any time between roughly 1978 and the cordon sanitaire of Wuhan¹, he gave it to them.

After some consultation with their supervisors and a combination of the hotelier probably not clicking "full image" when WeChatting them the photos he took the previous night of my passport and them also choosing to download the low res version's low res version, they decided that there was a chance that the color scans attached to my prefilled out Form might potentially, somehow, be different than the originals and that they therefore needed to get a look at my passport and compare it for accuracy before they used my Form as an info source when inputting the data into their computer.

I'd left the Memorial around 1:30 after the unveiling of tbe headstone was done as it was far too bright and sunny for anyone to really be able to see me on the screen I was telettending on and things were changing in the direction of picnic and it just made sense to go to sleep.

Even with a sleeping pill sized dose of Benadryl, the caffeine I'd consumed to stay sociably awake this late had different ideas than I did about going to sleep and I figure I wasn't actually out until some time past three.

So, at a bit past 9:00am, when the hotelier came knocking on my door, my answer was "go away, I'm sleeping". It worked about as well as "go away, I'm sleeping" has ever worked on anyone (i.e. not very) and I eventually got up, went to the bathroom, double checked to make sure that the shorts I was wearing covered enough of my butt to be worn farther than the to the bathroom and back again, and followed him upstairs.

There was more than one police officer but less than four. This much I'm certain of. I'm less certain though as to whether the actual number of policemen was two or three as my eyes weren't really ready yet for complicated tasks like focusing and one or more of the policemen was standing and had this disturbing habit of moving to another part of the room whenever I blinked².

That afternoon, as I sat and worked at my laptop in the restaurant area, I listened to the hotelier regaling anyone who would listen with stories about how incredible my Chinese was and how the police had spoken to me in local dialect, and I'd understood them. I had to at least somewhat trust his version of events as being vaguely accurate as the set of "questions the police are probably asking me" isn't really large enough in this environment to be negatively impacted by local variations in Mandarin.

What I thought I'd done, however, was mumble at them in a peeved and not at all awake tone of voice about the Form already having everything until they got sufficiently annoyed to leave and I could go back to sleep.

What country do you come from?

Didn't the hotelier give you the copy of my Form that I gave him?

What's your passport number?

Five something  it's on the Form.

When did you last enter China?

Last year. The date is on the Form.

I wasn't even trying to stonewall them. I just wasn't awake enough for things like accurately reciting strings of numbers and they'd already admitted to me that they had possession of my pre-filled Form which conveniently includes all the information that they need.

Once they left, I successfully navigated the unpleasantly steep and narrow stairs back to the rooms for rent, crawled back into bed, and got at least ten minutes of sleep before someone sent me a work message.

¹ Spot checks of whether or not hotel guests were registered was definitely a thing. But, even with this being a country as enamored of bureaucracy and make work tasks as this one is, it feels to me like daily checks are a very new very post Covid sort of thing.

² As it was full daylight, he probably wasn't a vampire and there were far far too many people present for him to be a Weeping Angel but, even if they were really slow blinks, it was a totally unnecessary amount of movement on his (their?) part.