Eric's Beijing Diary

Cherish came up to me today after class and said, "This tie is very beautiful. Can I take a picture of you?" I told her I bought it on the street for 20 kuai. For awhile there, I was buying ties quite often, because the street vendor never argued with me when I chose a tie and handed him 20 kuai. As a matter of fact, that's probably more then he gets from most local people. But his ties are pretty nice. Walk over to Hualian by the light rail station, and you can see the very same ties for several hundred kuai. I talked to a foreign teacher the other day who told me he paid 400 for a tie. I told him I paid 20. He said, "Yes, but if my tie has a problem, I get a new one." He may be right. But I don't need a warranty. I can buy a lot of 20 RMB ties for 400. Maybe not, though. The police have cleaned out a lot of those street vendors in Wudaokou. Now if I need a tie, I will have to go find a market somewhere.

Almost 2 am. I am in Hong Kong. You can't get a work visa for China in China (unless you buy it from a black market visa broker), you have to go out and come back in. I suppose every country has this rule, but fortunately, in the case of China, you don't need to go all the way back to your home country. The train ticket to Hong Kong or Shenzhen is not expensive. I chose to go to Shenzhen this time, because the train got in early Sunday morning, so it was easy for me to go to church. I was last here the end of July, to extend my visa by going out and coming back in just before it expired. A one year multiple-entry tourist visa gives you the right to enter China as many times as you like in a one year period as long as you don't stay more than 90 days on any one visit. Since I last entered China just before the expiration date, I automatically had another 90 days. When I got my current job, I thought I would have plenty of time to get my work visa before the 90 day stay had expired. But the government office in Beijing was way too slow about getting my paperwork ready, so I had didn't get that until the 10th. To minimize the number of class days I would have to miss, I waited until last Friday to leave so that I could be in the visa office first thing Monday morning. So I walked into Hong Kong from Shenzhen Sunday morning on Day 89 of a 90 day stay. Why does it always seem to come right down to the wire?

I decided to use a travel agency this time, partly because a Z visa is a little more complicated than a tourist visa, and because I really did need to have express service so I could get back to Beijing as soon as possible. I don't like paying a middle man to do stuff that I could just as easily do myself. But using a travel agency has the effect of putting you at the head of the line. I was in the visa office about 15 minutes turning in my application materials, and there was no line to stand in when I picked it up. Travel agencies are convenient, I will have to say that. But they don't do it for free. After I picked up my visa I was berating myself for paying someone else to stand in line for me, but when I got back to the youth hostel shuttle, another lady from the hostel who had decided to save money and do it herself told me that they were queuing way out into the street at the visa office.

So I sit here on Mt. Davis on a cool, quiet evening. Or I should say morning. But my mind is far from here. I had planned to be in Afghanistan right about now, but I decided to put it off, partly because I'm broke, and partly because I can't really afford it. Outside of my travel account, I was pretty bone dry. It's probably better this way, because in the initial stages of putting together an NGO, it isn't really appropriate for people to be supporting me when I'm not really doing that much. In fact, if there was a way to avoid being supported at all, I would strongly prefer it. I am not independently wealthy, so that may not be possible. But I am going to run it that way for as long as I can.

There is something else, and that is the visa situation. I have been living in China this past year on a tourist visa. A couple months ago, a guy from the US alerted me to the fact that China had revised their application process for the tourist visa. There's nothing really unfair about the new application, but it does seem that China doesn't want people to use a tourist visa to live in China. The actual fact is that they have never minded that, but they really seriously do mind people using a tourist visa to work in China. So they seem now to be addressing that problem by clamping down on people using tourist visas for anything other than scheduled, itinerant travel. But even before the change, tourist visas have always been problematic (especially for Americans) if you tried to get them outside of your home country. Usually the most you can get in Hong Kong is 30 days. That can be extended to 90 days, but that's it. I had a one year tourist visa. I have never heard of an American getting a visa like the one I had without going back to America.

Afghanistan is different. I went to the Afghan embassy in Beijing, and those guys were really friendly. They seem quite enthusiastic about giving visas to someone who is coming to help. So I could have gotten to Afghanistan, but I would have had trouble getting back. I don't even know if the Chinese consulate in Kabul would give me a visa at all. I tried to contact them, but they did not respond. So, I sit here in Hong Kong instead of in Afghanistan. I guess it just isn't time yet. God has his perfect time for everything, and it is always best to wait for it. Always.

I have written a number of book reviews for Amazon, and also for Powell's Books. For some reason, my review of Mao's Last Dancer has generated more comments than any other. I haven't written a review for some time, but I still get an email whenever someone comments on one of my reviews. Here is one I felt was worth sharing:

I feel that the reviewer is an honest man and tries to see "both sides", but unfortunately one cannot see the other side without experience it. I as a refuge from the communist country (former Czechoslovakia)remember how during the Nazi occupation we could not believe the Russian refugees from the USSR that Stalin is the same devil as Hitler. Several years later and lot of imprisoned, murdered people, we agreed. Maybe that is our human nature to learn so slowly. To simplify the problem: some people accept millions of executed people worth for the "social progress", others are inclined to accept Dostoevsky's ".. No revolution is worth of a tear of one child.."

Sincerely,

K.Kriz

I should say that, while my review was not without criticism, I did like the book, and gave it five stars. It is well worth reading. The comment of this reader makes me wonder if I would have seen the book differently if I had actually grown up in the China that Mao's last dancer came from. Perhaps. And Mr. Kriz seems to be referring to the issue of political repression. But there is also the issue of poverty. Many people in the China in which Mao's last dancer grew up were not inclined to be affected by political repression, because they were too desperately poor for it to matter. This, I think it the issue I was exploring. The Dancer rebelled against a system he disliked because it infringed upon his ability fully to experience the life of the privileged in America. But his exposure to that privileged American life was made possible only because he was among the privileged in China--a privilege granted to him by the very system against which he was rebelling. Would he have preferred the life of a poor man in America to his life of privilege in China?

This past week has been the October holiday. China has three "Golden Weeks." The first is in October, and coincides with the October revolution, when Mao stood on Tiananmen Gate and declared that China had "stood up." The second is the Chinese New Year, and the third is the May holiday. What this means is that the whole country goes on vacation at the same time. This makes for havoc on the trains. But in a way I do think it is a good thing. If it were not for these holidays, many working people would not get a holiday at all. I visited a sweater factory in South China some years ago, where the workers told me they had one day off a month.

Anyway, every day the hills are alive with the sound of people. It's not so bad, though, because most of them come on a bus, and there aren't any busses that get to the hills before six in the morning. More like 7 or 8 o'clock. So if I can get up to the East Gate before 6:30 or so, the park is still pretty pleasant and quiet. I start climbing right away, because even after people start coming, it takes them some time to work their way up to where I hang out. Most people have the idea that you're supposed to go to the top. I stay away from that place. I spend my time on the lateral trail about half way up the mountain.

I'm sure I have said this before, but you really can't beat a North China autumn. This is the nicest time of the year in Beijing. I notice it more than some, I suppose, because I particularly dislike Beijing summers. Everybody's different. When Jordan first came to China, he showed up in June. I was apologizing all over the place for the sultry weather, but he didn't seem to mind at all. I sure mind. I go to the Western mountains in the summer. So beautiful. But in the fall, there is no place I would rather be than right here in the Western hills.

Lots of talk about the passing of Steve Jobs. Certainly he was a key figure in the development of the IT revolution that took place in the seventies and eighties. In 1977, I took a course in "Basic Computer Coding." I was working off a Control Data 3300 at Oregon State University. I was not a student at OSU. I was a student at Oregon College of Education, twenty miles up the road. I sat in the computer room at an old military style teletype terminal. Processor time cost $25 for five minutes. But they gave you 5 minutes at the beginning of the class. I always figured out the logic of my program before I tried to run it, so as to minimize processor time. The teletype terminal had a punch tape dispenser that could print out your program on a punch tape. I rolled it up and put it in a Tupperware container. That was my data storage. Toward the end of that course, my professor told me that a company--I think it was Radio Shack, was coming out with a 4 K computer that could fit on a desktop. I was incredulous. Four thousand bytes of Random Access Memory in a desktop machine?? But it was true. The 4 K was followed shortly by the 16 K. Then the VIC 20. It was a small keyboard machine that you plugged into your TV. I was teaching in a country school in North Dakota when the school district purchased some Commodore Pet computers. Sixty-four thousand bytes, and a little cassette tape drive. Cool. I didn't have to type up the programs every time I ran a new one. Everybody was using BASIC in those days, but it was Apple that developed the Graphic User Interface with a mouse. It wasn't their innovation. Xerox engineers developed it at the Palo Alto research lab. Xerox paid big bucks for a research lab, but the powers that be did not appreciate what the engineers in that lab developed. Watch the movie, Pirates of Silicon Valley. Engineers from the Palo Alto research lab bring a mouse into the boardroom and demonstrate how it works. The executives each look at it quizzically and then pass it on. They rejected it as a useless toy. Big mistake.

Apple took the idea and developed it. Bill Gates saw what Apple had, and was determined to get it. So he formed an agreement with Apple, and copied the technology. There is a classic scene in the movie where Steve Jobs confronts Bill Gates for stealing the Windows technology. Gates said, "Xerox let the door open, and we just helped ourselves." The statement was technically true, but also disingenuous. Steve Jobs had not invented it, he had gotten it from Xerox, that's true. But Gates didn't get it from Xerox. He got it from Apple. This is a little bit of history that many people are not aware of. Microsoft would not be Microsoft without Steve Jobs.

During the early days of the microcomputer, I thought Apple was stupid for being so proprietary. Because they refused to license their platform, it became marginalized. But as time went on, I realized their wisdom. They had a very small corner, but what they had was all theirs. In those days, you either had a Mac, or an "IBM clone." I bought an IBM clone, as did most people. But IBM did not make a dime off my purchase. My computer was made by Hyundai. So IBM could boast that they had the most widely used platform, but what good did it do them? I made the mistake of judging Apple's approach based on market share. But the other night, I was listening to Rush Limbaugh on my old "home town" radio station from when I was in the trucking industry. He said, "Steve Jobs never cared about market share. He only cared about profit." That's the point. Market share and profit are not the same. And Apple's proprietary approach to hardware really paid off when they came up with the iPod and iPhone. They ruled the world. And created another revolution. Thursday night, Ahmed showed me his new Sony Ericsson phone running the Android system. Not an Apple product, but it was certainly inspired by the iPhone. Smart phones would not be smart phones without Steve Jobs.

Several years ago, a friend of mine told me about iTunes. I told her that I was not interested in buying an iPod. She told me the software, which comes on a CD with the iPod, could also be downloaded free. I decided to take a look. She had explained the podcasting feature to me, and I was curious. What I found changed my life. I had been going to a few websites and listening to or downloading news and information mp3 files. Now I go to each website once to subscribe, and after that, iTunes visits each website for me, checks for the latest program, and downloads it automaticallly.

I was not surprised to hear Rush Limbaugh praising Steve Jobs the other night. When I was a truck driver, I used to listen to Rush Limbaugh almost every day. He was a Mac fan, and mercilessly ridiculed anyone stupid enough to own a PC. The other night, he said that people asked him how he could like Steve Jobs when Jobs was known to be a liberal. He said, "I have always been a fan of greatness."

I have never owned an Apple computer. I am a server guy, and a technical trainer, so I have had to focus on the systems that most companies use. But all of us owe a debt of gratitude to Apple and Steve Jobs for the innovations that inspired the graphic user interfaces all of us now take for granted. Steve Jobs was not always an easy person to get along with. He was a perfectionist, and was once fired by his own company. But he set the standard for what a nice computer was supposed to look like, and every personal computer owner has benefited in some way from that standard.