May 28, 2021
The Police
I was ever so very pleased with myself for successfully finding the hotel I stayed at when I passed through Qingcheng nine years ago on the Great Adventure of a Lifetime.
Sure, I had rather specific geographical cues to add to my cgoab journal data and the photos I'd taken but, even so, it's been a long long time since the time I spent a single night in this town.
They remembered me. They were shocked to hear that it's already been nine years and pleasantly surprised that I somehow managed to remember them and everything was looking like it was going to be perfectly fine.
Until, as these things always go, it wasn't.
There's an option to check the names and other data on the foreign guests (inclusive of Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Macau) staying at your hotel - that works. There's also an exhaustive and very well documented training module on How to Register Foreigners for Dummies - that works. However, the actual Foreigner Registration part of the software......... it's Access Denied.
The police, of course, would rather I go to a foreigner hotel of which this city is supposed to have three. Being the stubborn ass that I am (and also rather wanting to climb the adjacent City Walls at dawn), I am unwilling to do this. Also, as I repeatedly bring up to the police, I really don't want to start every night for the next two weeks with a visit to the police station and finding out why the webpage based registration system is throwing an Access Denied error is really fucking important to me.
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The uniformed officer wants to argue with me. She doesn't argue with me but it's clear that she wants to. The plainclothes man who shows up as tech support and who tries all the things I already failed at is far better than her about being manipulative.
Which is not to say that I ever agree with him. Just that he pushes the right buttons on the right order as to make me politely realize that it's just going to be easier for everyone (including myself) if I just agree to leave.
One of those buttons being that I won't have to pay the substantial increase in price for staying at the nicer hotel.
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I already know that the logical and true reasons I have behind honestly wanting to stay at the grotty motel don't seem to penetrate most conversational barriers so, with the smug knowledge that a requisition form to pay for my room will be paperwork, and paperwork will maybe lead to something getting figured out, I agree.
On the drive over to the FancyPlace, he tries to convince me that part of why they'd gone with moving me instead of the paper form that I know they could have gotten off their intranet is because filing that form was a different level of complicated. I'm unconvinced but I nod appropriately and, after he says that they'll file their own request for assistance, I more or less agree to push the problem of "why doesn't it work?" onwards to officials in the next city.
I'm pretty sure that request never gets filed as, even though I'll get a call from the PSB on my way out of town two mornings hence wanting to confirm that I've left and in which direction I'm heading, my room is not paid for by the government.
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My room also isn't paid for by me.
My room (which has a bed that appears to be larger than the room I would have stayed in at the place near the City Walls) is paid for by the manager of the KTV on the fourth floor of the fancy hotel.
Cause when you run the kind of business that involves lots of alcohol and the occasional employee being busted for selling drugs, you don't mind doing a little favor here or there when the police ask nicely.
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3 years ago
If a Chinese visitor would be booted by police out of the Accent Inn in Victoria, BC and made to go stay with other Chinese at the Empress, it would be headline news on CBC, and could never stand. We should speak up when we see things like that portrayed as normal in other places, and that is why I have written this comment.
3 years ago
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.
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 but they didn't divide foreigners into a separate class.
For the most part, these regulations covered things like safety, security, and—most importantly—not looking like a impoverished country. 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". At worst, it was viewed as a cash grab (the facilities at a Foreigner Hotel not necessarily being readily apparent as better) or a way to ensure that the best customers went to your friend's hotel.
A "Foreigner Hotel" wasn't restricted from taking Chinese but a hotel that wasn't licensed to take foreigners, couldn't.
By the time I arrived, "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 whole concept of a foreigner hotel as defined by law went away completely in 2003. 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". Coming from a country that was only just shaking off the vestiges of an internal passport (called a hukou) being something with real teeth, it didn't matter what nationality you were, you still registered with the hotel and the hotel—if operating according to the law—still passed that registration on to the police.
Passing the registration on to the police became more streamlined with a computer registration system that I first encountered in 2008.
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 card) 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.
3 years ago