Safety and security in China
This post is not about what to do to avoid having your backpack stolen in China. Although scare stories about criminality abound in China, I think it’s a lot better than most other places - especially for foreigners. There is undoubtedly a huge amount of scams going around, especially involving cell phones, but that’s a whole different chapter. In fact, in all my time of living and travelling on the cheap in China, I’ve only once lost a camera, and it might just as well have fallen out of my pocket on the bus (seriously).
No, this is about public security, as implemented by the state, and felt by the common man and woman - kind of as a parallel to all the crazy public security measures that have appeared in the US after 9/11. (The following is just a collection of my musings and observations on a loosely common topic).
Train stations
I have spent a lot of time in train stations, both when living long-term in China, and these last few weeks. Nothing much has changed these last eight years at all. It’s still an incredibly efficient and huge system. Already back in 2000, I thought it was funny that they had you send your bags through an x-ray at the entrance of the train station (only for those actually going on a train, not for going to buy a ticket etc). Of course, the farmers often bring gigantic bags - some of them might be migrant workers literally carrying all their belongings. Not quite sure what they are looking for, they certainly have never pulled me over for some liquids or nail clippers or anything like that.
Today, they actually searched everybody’s bags quite throughly also, including mine, which has never happened before. Not sure if they were worried about something in specific, or if this was simply the result of boarding at a tiny “rural” station, with all the “farmers”.
I think what they are most worried about is explosives, although I’ve barely ever heard about any train exploding. But with the farmers bringing all kinds of stuff, it certainly wouldn’t be surprising if some of them brought a three liter can of petrol, and with all the smoking going on in the corridors… They have huge signs everywhere, even on buses, cautioning people not to bring explosives or flammable material aboard.
I remember once, taking the train from Shenzhen to Wuhan, when we were treated to a half an hour long expose about the kind of dangerous articles we shouldn’t bring on the train, thorugh the train loudspeakers. In typically pedogogical Chinese, which sounds ridiculous when translated: “Travelling friends, you might have noticed the sign saying ‘Don’t bring any dangerous articles onboard’? But what does ‘dangerous articles’ mean? Well, there are 9 kinds. The first kind is knives. What kinds of knives? Well there are…”, and so on.
Tickets
There is no registration of name or checking of ID, neither when buying tickets or when entering the train (in contrast to for example Russia), although I heard that they are considering implementing this to slow down on hoarding of tickets (not sure to what extent this really happens). However, when I took the train from Chongqing to Beijing, for the first time, the train attendant went around with a little very fancy gadget, got everyone’s ID cards, and “scanned them” somehow. She put them on a plate, and clicked a button, and I am not sure if it just read the barcode or actually took a digital picture of the entire ID. Most of the passengers had modern VISA-card size national ID cards, but a few had the older ones, and then she had to enter them manually. She wasn’t even interested in my passport. Not sure what they are using that for - and it only happened that once, I’ve taken several trains after that without that happening.
Your ticket is checked several times during your travel, and it would be incredibly difficult to sneak in without a valid ticket. First, it is checked when entering the waiting room (passing the x-ray machine), although you can buy a platform ticket for a few yuan, to get in. You then sit at the assigned place for your train, often there are several waiting rooms, and in each waiting room there will be several gates. Twenty-thirty minutes before the train is about to leave, the gates open, and you pass through the gates (often several per train), getting your ticket clipped in the process. Usually each gate leads onto only one platform, but sometimes you have to go over a walkbridge, and could theoretically enter different platforms.
Then, if you have an assigned seat or sleeper, you go to that car, and at each car door there is an attendant who checks your ticket again. If you get onto a sleeper, after a while the attendant will come around and exchange all the tickets for tokens. She puts the tickets in a books, with little plastic windows for each bed. This way, she can easily see who gets off where, and can wake you up when you reach your destination in the middle of the night. Then you get your ticket back. This doesn’t happen in the hard seats. I’ve never taken a soft seat, so I am not sure if it happens there. Finally, when you get off at the station, you again have to show your ticket to excit the arrival area.
Hotel registration
Theoretically all hotels should require registration of all guests. In practice this often does not happen. It has happened in the cheapest of hotels, which just includes filling in a form (and a certain amount of head-scratching as you present them with a passport - they are very happy if you just tell them what your Chinese name is). The two main kinds of lodging options in China are hotels and guesthouses (zhaodaisuo - 招待所). The first can range from incredibly expensive, to fairly cheap, whereas the other one is always very cheap (although there is still a range, one can choose from single rooms to shared rooms with 6 people).
During my first time in China I was stopped a few times and told that I was not allowed to live somewhere because I was a foreigner - this was usually at cheap hotels, costing around 60 yuan per night. After that, I have never been stopped, but I am not sure if that is because I go to the cheaper zhaodaisuo, often paying as little as 15-30 yuan per night (or less in the rural areas), or because restrictions have lifted. When I stepped off the train in Linqing at 3 AM, I didn’t show any ID at the tiny guesthouse next to the station, I walked in and asked how much it was, she told me 10 yuan, and I gave it to her. She showed me a room with 5 beds, and I got to bed and slept. During the night, several other passengers came in and went to sleep as well.
Internet cafes
Even when I was living in Wuhan in 2001, some internet cafes required registration. Often they would have a book, where we would have to enter our name - I was usually exempt. This time in China, I have been to a lot of different cities, and gone to internet cafes, and never been asked for ID before today. When I came to the first internet cafe, they wouldn’t let me log on, because they didn’t know how to register my ID card. Then I went to the one next door, and they were happy to let me on - after noting down my passport number.
One thing that has been a frequent topic in China these last years, has been to require “real names” of net users who blog, or sign up for a social website. One problematic result of this is that overseas participants, who obviously don’t have a Chinese ID number, are excluded from these spaces. A friend of mine in Toronto has had this problem on a number of Chinese websites, where he wished to participate.
Conclusion
No conclusion really, just got to think of this after wanting to store my luggage after coming off the train to Hengshui, and together with another traveller being asked to follow the attendant in the private luggage storage shop. It turned out she wanted us to bring the bags through the entrance to the train station, to have them x-rayed, so she could see that there was no problem, before she asked us to take them back to the shop to store them. I thought it was a funny way to piggyback off the security system implemented by the train station. Then, when I was for the first time in a long while denied entry to an internet cafe, because I didn’t have a Chinese ID card, I decided to write this entry. No conclusions about what is necessary or unecessary, just observations.
Stian
