Muninn

In some countries you pay your electricity every month to an electric company, based on what amount you have used for the preceding month. When you set up the account they will come by and check your meter and begin the count. In the Komaba International House in Japan, near Tokyo University’s Komaba campus, where I lived for a few months as a student, you “charged” your room with electricity and the amount still remaining on your account was displayed conveniently on a little meter near the entrance to one’s room.

Everyday you could see how much “juice” you had left and could make a guess as to whether you had enough to make it through another day. This was a reasonable system, once you got used to it, although the dormitory had its other issues.

Here in my apartment in China, they opted for another method. You charge your room with electricity, as one does at the Komaba dormitory in Japan, but the only place you can read the meter is hidden deep in the bowels of the pipe room of one’s floor where it is accessible only to a custodian with a flashlight and a hefty collection of keys.

So when I came down with a horrible fever and cold this week, and was drifting in and out of consciousness, I was not happy to discover that, in the middle of the night, my electricity shut off, and therefore my electric heater, because my charge had run out. Stumbling around in the darkness, knocking over a cup of cold tea leaf filled tea, I managed to make my way down to security and they got the poor janitor up to charge my room with another 10RMB (the maximum amount the janitor is allowed to accept from me outside of regular hours), which, it turned out, provided only another 8 hours of continuous heating for my room with my electric heater.

So, as you can imagine, I have been eagerly awaiting that beautiful moment when “the heating” turns on for my building (and my city? I’m not sure, but this is usually a pretty centralized operation in China) and I can stop wasting electricity on my (less efficient) electric heater. The nice steamy water pipe heating I have been waiting for made for a cozy and comfortable winter when I lived in China last time in 1999-2000, as long as one didn’t touch the pipes at their entry point. I’m not exactly sure by what mysterious process it gets decided by the powers that be that it is cold enough to have heating, but, believe, me, it is.

Thus consider my dismay when I get on the elevator in my apartment complex today to see a sign that says,

“53 households said they want heating this winter, while 34 households said they did not want heating this winter. In accordance with the law, since less than 70% of the households in the building want heating this winter, we will not be turning on the heat.”

It looks like, in addition to not getting any of the mail sent to me here in China over the last month despite several confirmations of my address, somebody else might have used my ballot for this crucial election…

In many countries you’re required to register your place of residence with some local government body. I think this is technically also the case in Norway, although I’ve rarely done it, but it’s something that I’ve now had to do both in Japan and China. In Korea, either because of my unusual visa status during my longest stay of a year, or because I simply ignore the rules regarding residence registration, I have yet to experience this process.

When I lived in Tokyo and Yokohama the registration of my place of residence was done almost immediately after my entry into Japan, because this was one of the first steps that allowed you to function in Japanese society, and do things like open a bank account, get a cell phone, and other such important initial steps to starting a life in the country. This is because the registration of one’s residency is combined with the getting of a foreigner registration card. Once, when I moved from an international dormitory near Tokyo University to a new apartment in Kichijôji, I had to go through the registration process again since the new location was technically in the city bounds of Musashino, a city in the suburbs of Tokyo.

Overall I’ve been really impressed with the smooth nature of the process in Japan, even though getting one’s registration card can take a few days and finding the local ward or city office can sometimes be a challenge if you’re fresh off the boat. Generally speaking Japanese ward and city offices, especially in larger cities, have relatively good services for foreigners and I was always impressed with the fact that when I registered myself, even though I went through application process for a foreigner registration card, I still felt like I was being welcomed into a given community. I was often offered a handful of brochures about local athletic and health facilities, trash filtering and recycling, and other information. The two times I lived in Japan a year or more I was able to get registered into the Japanese national health insurance program which allowed me to get access to relatively cheap and high quality Japanese public health services, often offered at prices much cheaper than that I might get in the US. Also, the local city and ward offices often host a number of community activities, language classes and other cultural activities, and sometimes make an extra effort to reach out to foreigners in the community through these activities and the providing of information in multiple languages. This probably wasn’t always the case but I do get the impression that Japan has come a long way in addressing the increasingly large foreign community in its cities.

Today I went through the registration process for my residency in China for the first time. Although I lived in China twice before, once for three months and once for a year, on both of these occasions I lived in a dormitory on a university campus and I don’t remember going through a similar process.

After staying in a hotel for a few days I found an apartment here by going directly to a real estate agent (believe it or not, my first stop was the nearby Century 21, which has branches in all the neighborhoods around Shandong University). Compared to my experience here in Jinan, I found this to be a much less foreign friendly process in Japan and also in Korea as in both places it’s relatively difficult to find short-term housing options that aren’t quite expensive for very modestly sized apartments. However, despite the fact that I’m in a provincial capital with most likely a small number of foreign students I was surprised to see that real estate agents almost immediately offered me a number of options when I told him I was looking for an apartment to rent for a few months. I ended up renting an apartment from a military officer who owns a number of small places in the area in clean and recently built apartment complexes, and although the real estate agent told me that registering my new residency with the local police station was more trouble than it was worth, the international office at my university told me that I did have to go through this process. It was very different from that of the Japanese process.

I was first directed to the local ward police station and then sent up to the second floor where the plain clothes police officers work in various offices there. After a short conversation with a female police officer in charge, I was then sent back to the local police corner branch located just around the corner from my apartment complex to meet someone she called on the phone there. There I was met by a friendly elderly police officer who was to join me for an “inspection.” He told me that he had to accompany me back to my apartment in order to see if my apartment was “appropriate” or not. Now, I’m sure that there were some rational reason behind this and there is some logic at work here which I’m just not aware of, but I did feel kind of strange having a police officer escort me back to my apartment, inspect it, and decide whether or not it was appropriate as my residency. He did come back with me, poked around my kitchen and bathroom, and inspected my bookshelf but didn’t go as far as opening drawers or inspecting the contents of my refrigerator. He was friendly throughout and we had a little chat before we went back to the police station. I was then sent back, again, to the main ward police station which is about 15 minutes walk down the road, where I had to fill out a registration form for outsiders taking up residency in that particular ward. I was then sent back, again, to the corner police station where I filled out another form to register me as a resident of that particular block. They also contacted my landlady to get some more information from her. Although there was a lot of going back and forth and at times it seemed like I was one of the only foreigners who had actually gone about this process, since several of the police officers seemed somewhat unfamiliar with the procedures, things went smoothly enough so that I only had to spend a single afternoon on the process. Thinking about all the visa nightmares faced, and hoops needing to be jumped through by non-imperial citizens traveling to the US, I really don’t think I have much reason to complain.

I have just gotten settled in here in Jinan, in Shandong province, China. Except for a few weeks in Shanghai and Nanjing, I’ll be here until the end of next April doing my dissertation research affiliated with Shandong University.

A young history masters student who has been helping me out since I got here and showing me around the libraries of the university invited me to join him for a trip to the used book market here. He told me he makes the trip down there every two or three weeks to look for good deals on academic history books on his period.

The used book market is open on weekends from around 8am until noon in Sun Yatsen park (中山公园). There are perhaps close to a hundred bookstore stalls and open-air table-based vendors. The selection varies widely of course, with some stores specializing in books on Chinese medicine, others on test prep books, others on Chinese literature, but most have a wide selection of what appear to be left over stock from bookstores. I’m guessing this since many books are cut partly on the spine to distinguish them from new books. I was surprised to see such a large selection of academic and especially history books, including collections of historical materials, obscure reference books, and historical journals. Amazingly, and thanks to the good eyes of my friend, one of the 18 books I bought today for just over $10 was a very useful pamphlet put out by the office of the Shandong provincial historical society that I had noted down for future copying only a few days earlier in the library of Shandong University’s history department. It has an index of periodicals published in Shandong from before 1949, with list of extant issues and which library or archive in the province still has those issues (建国前山东旧期刊目录1903-1949).

The price of the academic books on history I was looking at currently seem to average around 5 RMB (less than $1) but many books go for 1, 1.5, or 3 RMB. Sometimes, and I have no idea what market forces are at work here since it really seemed quite arbitrary, prices could go as high as 10 or 30 RMB. Perhaps a bookseller catches a glint in the eye of the purchaser indicating that he desperately wants a copy? Regardless, considering that many of the books in question go for 30-50 RMB new, these books are quite heavily discounted, in contrast with the Japanese used book market for academic works.

The used book market clearly draws a lot of students and there was an excellent showing from the department I’m affiliated with. I was told there are currently 13 graduate students in the history department of Shandong University, mostly masters students. A good half dozen of these were in the book market today prowling for good deals. These students would often keep an eye out for books each of them might have particular interest in and sometimes made cellphone calls to friends absent who might appreciate them snapping up some bargains. They would also compare prices with each other and use it in their efforts to bargain. One student found a Chinese translation of a volume of the Cambridge History of China for just over $1, while another who heard about this was frustrated in his efforts to bargain down a separate copy found elsewhere to under its $5 price. I was also interested to hear that students had been directed to snap up available copies of one of their professor’s books to give them. While the professors can buy somewhat discounted copies of their own books from the publisher, it is even cheaper to get them, or have their students get them from the used book market, perhaps for use as gifts to friends.

I’m really impressed at how much some of these graduate students seem to know about Chinese history works coming out the US and with their excellent critical skills and strong curiosity for new approaches to history. One student invited me to some kind of history reading club in the afternoon and said he wanted me to share with them what good stuff was being published in the US academic field on Chinese history. I explained that I had been out of the country for a while and had been reading mostly Korean and Japanese history of late so that I wasn’t really up to date on trends in English language scholarship on China, but that I was willing to pass on a few orals lists used by graduate students in the US. I was surprised to be assured that this wasn’t necessary since all they really needed were Chinese history books newly published in English in 2007 and 2008!

More pictures available in a variety of sizes can be found here.