Peaceful Rise

As expected, I didn't last too long in my job at the state-owned enterprise, and now I'm back to watching episodes of DS9 on youku . As per Jackie's suggestion, I feel I should share some insights into the inner workings of the propaganda machine here, having now worked as a part of it, but really there's not much to say.  The long and the short of it that these people are all idiots.  I didn't find it much different from working in New Oriental.  There, our team of people, each person uniquely unsuited for their job, worked blindly to make a crappy product that would never sell.  And even though it was a private enterprise, my coworkers were concerned with censoring the content to make sure nothing remotely bad was said about anything, either in China or elsewhere. The SOE was just the same, except that it didn't matter if their products didn't sell, since they were government funded whether their products sold or not.  The only motivating factor for an...

Welcome, foreigner! Although it's been policy to require foreigners to register residency with their local PSB for a long time now, it's probably only this year that the policy has grown some teeth, and the police have actually become insistent about enforcing it.  Just last week I found big white posters on the bulletin board by the gate of my apartment, and also on the doors to our units, marked with our police cartoon friend Jingjing (not to be confused with the Olympic panda mascot , whose name is spelled the same), giving us a friendly reminder to register at the local station for a temporary residence permit within 24 hours of the start of our stay.  And though personally so far I've been spared the intrusion, over the past several months I've been hearing stories from friends of friends who have had the police go door to door through their apartments asking to see foreigners' registration and fining those without. But what I just discovered, to my shoc...