How to Finger China and Get The Gate Open
I have decided to write again about a bottleneck and breakthrough situation here in China, this time about the new gates and locks and disaster created for my five minute walk to work. This is a phenomenon of a thugocracy, where new rules are constantly created, which creates new problems, but nobody has a way to complain and resolve such problems. In democracies people complain. In a thugocracy like China, you put up with it, then find a way around it.
About two years ago, when I switched offices and started walking to work, just a five minute commute that begins in the apartment complex where I live, crosses over railroad tracks, then enters and leaves a neighboring, I quickly encountered a problem. The neighboring community was building a fence around itself, for no apparent purpose, and erecting all sorts of gates and locks and fences.
The first sign that there were going to be major problems was when I arrived one morning at a newly erected gated entrance to the area I had already passed before. There were suddenly three teenage guards in long, police like overcoats, checking everyone’s id, and requiring people to swipe a card to get in. I talked with them.
“What is going on here?” I asked.
“We have new rules here now. You need a magnetic card issued only to residents of this community to enter”
“But, I shop and get my hair cut inside.” I told them. I didn’t want to confuse the issue with an explanation of why I commute there.
They required me, like the other 50 people suddenly stopped on their way to and from tasks, to figure out the telephone number of the business or people we know within the community, which I certainly didn’t have, call them, and get an escort.
Absurd. Two weeks later, however, the situation changed, and the guards instead of requiring people to get an escort, instead had a series of paper entrance permits, and a log book for each. When I arrived, I asked:
“What is this?”
“If you want to enter, you need to fill out the log book and entrance permit, and carry the permit while you are inside. There is no longer a need to call someone to escort you inside.”
That worked for about 10 hours, until later that evening they ran out of entrance permits. Then, they just started denying everyone entrance, or just started letting everyone in.
Now, it has been about two years of this silliness, and I’ve seen the continuing evolution of the system. The area management sometimes has guards there, sometimes doesn’t, sometimes fixes broken gates, sometimes lets the gates stand broken for weeks on end. Today I saw the horrible sight of guards running down some random guy who, like nearly everyone else, just slipped under or around the gate. They tackled him, as everyone else continued to do the same thing.
On days that I can’t find a guard, or the gate is permanently broken, or the guard himself doesn’t have a magnetic card (I assume the cards are long forgotten, and everyone except the gates themselves have been informed, since they don’t open without the magnetic card), I learned that if you stick your pinky finger into the lock hole of the gate then you can quickly open the lock. So, while guards sit idle, gates sit broken, there’s a steady stream of us who have simply lost patience with this stupidity and line up, one after the next, poking our pinky in a dark, cold, metal hole twice a day, just to be able to get to work.
April 3, 2008 at 10:42 am
[...] a purpose and are occasionally severely enforced, but usually ignored. The new rule today is one I’ve discussed previously: the need to have a card to pass through an enormous housing area on the way to work. As I wrote in [...]