China trip 9 - Creepy Internet Stuff

I’m going to digress into Internet Geek land for this post, apologies to those who aren’t interested, but I do have some friends that I think will be keen to read about my experiences, and I tried to keep it pretty non-technical, so it may appeal to others as well.

As you’re no doubt aware, PRC has a love-hate relationship with the Internet. They want to embrace the technology and the connectedness it represents, but they view it as a threat because it is a means for people to undermine the sovereignty of the State by exposing its citizens to “propaganda” in the form of ideas that run counter to the official State view of the world. Access to many things that the censors deem unacceptable is blocked via the “Great FireWall of China” which is in the path of nearly all Internet traffic entering or leaving the country. Things that are blocked include most social media sites, sites considered to be injurious or dissident to the Chinese government (see also my experience when researching Tian’anmen Square on Wikipedia), obscenity, etc. Further, traffic is usually logged and sniffed, so that they know who is trying to reach things that they ought not be looking at. In the past, I had heard that common VPN tunneling techniques were blocked, because this encrypted and therefore obfuscated the traffic, allowing the end user to bypass these controls. However, until the conference started, I’ve been using the hotel network, which allows VPN, so I can connect back via my company’s network in the US and use the Internet as if I was sitting in my office. Obviously, latency to go from Beijing to Kansas and back out to my destination is high but manageable. Probably won’t be streaming any Netflix, but VoIP works passably – called home via my company's MS Unified Communications and only noticed the occasional artifact. Now, I’m not sure if they started allowing VPN in the more international tourist-friendly hotels because it was becoming so commonplace for international travelers to need to use a VPN to reach things at work, or if they simply don’t care anymore because they have devices capable of breaking the crypto. I’d like to hope that it’s the former, because the latter gives me the heebie-jeebies. I’m still changing passwords on the sites I accessed while I’m here when I get back, just to be on the safe side.

Along those same lines, IETF has had to do things a bit differently in the way that they set up their networks for the conference. In most locations, the IETF brings in dedicated access, sets up open wireless in all of the common areas, and often takes over the conference hotel’s in-room connectivity, because well, you can’t have 1000+ Internet geeks descend on your average hotel with its average assumptions about how much bandwidth is enough and have it end in anything but tears. Our average usage is somewhere north of 50mbps now. They’ve been making a secured (WPA2) network available for those who don’t use a VPN and would like to not have their wireless in the clear, but it’s not used as extensively as the open AP. This time, there is not exactly an open network. There is a network that you can connect to without authentication, but it redirects you to an authentication page where you have to enter your credentials from the conference to gain access, sort of like when you have to sign into a paywall on a non-free wireless network. There is also an 802.1x authenticated network in both the hotel rooms and the conference area. This is because one of IETF’s requirements is that their network be allowed unfettered access to the internet – i.e. no firewalls allowed. I’m not convinced that this translates to no sniffing or logging, but there’s at least no blocked content. Therefore, the Chinese government is requiring IETF to limit access to attendees only. While there are a lot of Chinese nationals attending the conference (over 1/3 of the attendees), I guess that the assumption is that they would have the same level of access if this was being held elsewhere, and therefore there is no additional risk. Plus, I remember seeing news items that the Chinese government was requiring its citizens to run filtering software locally on their computers, so perhaps they’re simply controlling it that way.

Additionally, the conference is having to be much more strict than usual in controlling access to the meeting itself. Normally, people don’t much care if you aren’t always wearing your badge, especially if you are well-known as a regular attendee at IETF meetings – you won’t be challenged as to your registration when you walk into a meeting. Here, there are hotel staffers posted at the entrances to the conference areas that are checking badges to ensure that only registered attendees may enter. I’m thinking that this may have had something to do with an early contract scuffle that the IETF had with the conference hotel.

Originally, the hotel had a line in the contract saying something to the effect of, “if any attendee says anything prohibited by law, we reserve the right to terminate the contract and kick you out.” IETF obviously balked at this, and did a survey of its members to find out if they would attend a meeting held in China with that condition. The overwhelming response was no, because IETF is very much a meeting where open discussion is important, and that would have a serious chilling effect on the tone of the meeting. This gave them the leverage that they needed to tell the hotel in no uncertain terms that they could either have that line in the contract and have no conference, or they could remove that from the contract. Since the proceedings of the meetings are very much on the record (posted on the internet), I can see why they would want to ensure that no one outside of the conference be given open access.

Memo to all of the people who are quick to accuse members of our government of being socialists, fascists, or Nazis simply because they support an agenda you disagree with: Go to visit an actual socialist country with a truly repressive regime for a little while, and stop taking your freedom to complain about the government for granted, especially when you use that freedom to say things that are chosen for their hyperbolic impact without much thought to their veracity or their ability to advance rational debate on the matter.

As it is, part of me wonders if this blog won’t eventually lead to me showing up on some dissident watch list and being denied a visa renewal should I ever want to return to China.

China trip 8 - Vehicles

No travel blog from me would be complete without some notes on cars:

China is left-hand drive, so the JDM vehicles don’t all make it over here directly.

Taxies are mostly either Hyundai Elantras or Jettas, with the odd Citroen every now and again. Note that the taxis are not exactly what we’d think of when we think of Jetta. They are old Jetta (Mk. 2) body and seats, but the switchgear is more modern VW (including the blue instrument lighting). To make matters even more confusing, they also sell the newer Jettas (Mk. 4) as Bora, and the latest Jetta (Mk. 5) as Sagitar here. Plus the Passat (Mk. 5), plus something called the Santana 2000 (which Wikipedia tells me is the Passat Mk. 2, which was called the Quantum in the US), plus the Polo. Sheesh.

Lots of black Audi A6s with tinted windows, including a lot of A6 L’s, which I assume are long-wheelbase for livery use. They seem to be the “hotel car” of choice here. I knew they made an A8 L, but didn’t realize they also made the A6 that way. I also saw a nice cross-section of Cayennes, including a Turbo, MLs, a 911 Turbo, and lots of Mercedes including several AMGs, and even one Rolls Royce, parked outside of our hotel! Now you know where all of your Wal-Mart money is going I guess…

I also saw a couple of Hummer H2s, which given the traffic and drivers here, is probably a good choice. I don’t know whether fuel economy is a consideration… On the other end of the spectrum I saw a Chevy Uplander minivan badged as a Buick, and did you know that Buick makes a Hybrid here? The LaCrosse (not the one we know, this is a different car unique to China as far as I can tell) comes in a hybrid version with GM’s Belt Alternator Starter system that was seen in the Saturn Vue mild hybrid.

I mentioned the tinted windows – oddly, even the most deep-tinted windows leave an approximately 2 square foot trapezoid of glass un-tinted on the front driver and passenger windows right near the side mirrors. I assume that it is so the driver can see the mirrors better, but the tint didn’t seem so deep that this would make that much of a difference, so perhaps it’s some sort of law, because every car I saw with tinted windows was done this way.

Interestingly, like the US, almost all of the cars are gasoline-powered, very few diesels outside of heavy trucks and busses. There are also some buses here that are combination electric and diesel, but not self-contained. They have a pantograph to pull power from overhead lines like a trolley, but they can drive under conventional diesel power if they have to deviate from the powered route.

The police use all sorts of interesting things, from vans to Hyundais to Jeep Grand Cherokees. They also have a small electric van (about the size of a Mini Cooper), and at least two different models of Honda motorcycle, a CB250 and an ST1100.

There are still plenty of bicycles (and variants) here, most roads have dedicated bike lanes, and the passenger overpasses that allow people to cross the major roads safely and without impacting traffic all have 2 or 3 foot wide bike ramps on either side of the stairs. Motorized bicycles and small scooters appear to be allowed to use the bike lanes and sidewalks, so they’re quite popular. A lot of the motorized devices are actually electric, which is probably good since they aren’t contributing to the pollution problem (at least not directly). The interesting thing is that a lot of local vendors and people who need some cargo capacity have either bikes or trikes with flatbed areas on the back of them. I even saw a full-fledged motorcycle that had been converted to a trike for the express purpose of cargo hauling behind the driver. It seems to be the Chinese equivalent to the compact pickup truck, because I haven’t seen a single real truck except for delivery trucks (and of course SUVs) the entire time. I also saw multiple scooters with these fur-lined vinyl covers over the handlebars. Think of a pair of hand mufflers for when you are riding the scooter. I guess that they’d be more effective than a pair of fabric gloves at blocking the wind, and you wouldn’t necessarily have to wear gloves unless it was really cold. Pretty neat idea.

Most of the road signs are of the European style – no words, just symbols, but there are a couple that I should mention. First, there is one that basically means “No entry for vehicles carrying explosives, inflammables or hazardous chemicals” but looks like this – a car with an explosion on the roof. The other interesting sign that I saw, that I can’t for the life of me find a picture of, including on the official Beijing traffic sign site, is basically a cartoon car with a giraffe sticking out of the sunroof. General idea is low clearance, and some of the references I found to it on the internet said that it sometimes includes the English words “Don't ride your vehicle too high”. I’m really kicking myself for not taking a picture of it, but when you see something like that in traffic while in a taxi, by the time you realize it’s something you should be taking a picture of, it’s too late.

Update - I sent a message out to our attendees list, and two different folks sent me links: This one (thanks to Ted Lemon) and  this one (thanks to Huub Helvoort). Hurray hive mind!

I rode in a good number of taxis while I was here, and there were a wide range of levels of aggressive drivers among the cabbies – some that would have been at home in NYC, others that were pretty polite and conservative in their driving. However, with only one or two exceptions, they were all horrible at driving a manual transmission, especially in traffic, and all of the taxis were manuals. There were some drivers that were really hurting my feelings with how bad they were at it – we’d slow down to 15 KPH for stopped traffic, and once they got around the obstacle, they’d be trying to accelerate in 4^th gear, with the engine bucking and protesting the whole way. I’ve taught 3 or 4 different people to drive manuals, and most of them weren’t that bad on their first day, let alone if it was their job to drive all day every day. Made me want to learn the Chinese phrase for “downshift, moron!”

China trip 2 - Saturday playing tourist

After sleeping for about 9 hours, showering, and eating, I was starting to feel human again, and today was my day to go wander in the sun and play tourist in order to try to reset my body clock ahead 12 hours… think about that when you set your clock back and get an extra hour.

Breakfast

Breakfast at the hotel is also a buffet. It’s listed as costing 200 RMB (about $30), but is fortunately included in the price of my hotel room. It has some savory items, some western items, and overall a good selection, including some steamed Chinese buns, fruits of all types, yogurt, an omelette station, sausage and bacon, cured meats and cheeses, and salads. They have a guy running a juicer, and one of the juices on offer is Watermelon juice. It’s quite tasty, sort of like distilled watermelon flavor. I also have been able to try dragon fruit which tastes sort of like a mix of apple and kiwi.

One of the interesting things is that they have several of the Chinese buns (chewy glutinous dough, stuffed with some sort of filling and then steamed) that were made up to look like different animals. They had one with cuts in the dough to make it look spiky and two black dots for eyes to make a hedgehog, one with some sort of black fruit to serve as eyes, ears, and nose to make a Panda, and then one with a different shape (think Marshmallow peep) and a yellow color that looked like a baby chick. The filling was slightly sweet and vaguely lemon-flavored, almost like poundcake. If I had known that this was the only day that they would do it, I would have gone back to get my camera, so unfortunately, no pictures.

Suitably fed, it was time to go play tourist.

First stop was the Forbidden City – cab fare was all of 40 RMB ($6), plus same for entrance to Forbidden City, and then same again for an automated English walking tour guide. $18 is pretty good for a day of touristing.

Cabbie on the way there was apparently tired of waiting in traffic, made a right turn because the right turn lane was open, drove about 500 yards past the intersection, and then pulled a U-Turn right in the middle of the street – in front of oncoming traffic (!), then made a right to get back on the street we were just on.

Forbidden City is very large (250+ acres). I spent probably 3 hours walking around, and I didn’t even see everything. It’s hard to describe, other than to say that it served as living, working, government and ceremonial space for the Emperor and his court of multiple hundreds of people. There are at least 12 palaces which held either concubines, eunuchs, sons of the Emperor and their wives, the Emperor and his wife, etc. All of it is very ornate, with amazing craftsmanship in the details, especially the intricate carvings on the roofs of the buildings, stone sculptures, and tilework. There are also areas where court was held, festivals were celebrated, etc. One of the most amusing was the Palace of Accumulated Beauty (or as my guide translated it, Concentrated Beauty), which was the place where the concubines for the emperor lived and where new ones were judged.

There are lovely gardens, and many cypress trees which have been molded into different shapes, and are now hundreds of years old. I got to see one of the first telephone switching rooms in China as well.

What’s funny is that after I came back from dinner and checked my RSS feeds, this was posted on EngrishFunny.

I saw hundreds of these signs in the Forbidden City today, and my hunch is that one of those occasionally snarky Internet Geeks who usually attend the IETF saw this and posted it to this website in the last couple of days…

From there, I walked to Tian’anmen gate, headed for the well-known (infamous?) Square of the same name. As you walk out of the Forbidden city, you pass through yet another very ornate gate, through a small square, and then a tunnel under the actual gate. As you exit the tunnel, you look back to find that you are walking under a huge painting of Chairman Mao, with two large placards in Chinese on either side of it. Wikipedia tells me that the left one reads "Long Live the People's Republic of China", while the right one reads "Long Live the Great Unity of the World's Peoples". Across the street is the square itself. You have to actually go under the street using a tunnel in order to get to Tian’anmen Square itself, and once you get to the entrance, you see that the entire area is fenced in, with only one entrance that everyone gets funneled through. There is a security checkpoint there, which has an XRay machine that all bags have to go through, and then they appeared to be using handheld metal detectors and pat-downs on the Chinese that went through. Apparently, tall, slightly overweight Geekus Americanus tourists are deemed to be non-threatening, because they waved me through with no further inspection. Perhaps if I had been wearing my Google t-shirt, I would have garnered more attention, but I made a point not to wear it that day.

Inside Tian’anmen square is the Monument to the People’s Heroes, as well as the Mausoleum where Mao is buried. Mao’s building has two large sculptures on either side, but I am unable to find much by way of explanation of what they represent. Entrance to Mao’s Mausoleum is “free with valid ID” but it is only open until noon, and I was there well afternoon, so no looking at dead revolutionaries under glass for me today. I noted that there was heavy police and military presence in and around the square, as well as video cameras mounted to the very large light posts that populate the area. As you walk down the street away from the square itself, I actually saw police in what could be considered SWAT or riot gear – low-grade body armor, helmet, and a pretty heavy-duty billy club. Not as reassuring as perhaps it was intended to be.

Here’s one for you: Tien’anmen literally means “heavenly peace” and Chang’an Avenue, which I crossed to get to the square means “forever peace.” So… yeah.

While I’d bet that Alanis would have had trouble working that into her song, you could just about trip over the irony in all of that.  I think that the thing that bothers me most about Tian’anmen Square is the fact that there is no memorial, not so much as a mention of the protests that killed at least hundreds, if not thousands of people. Apparently this is still one of the things that is very carefully censored inside of China – they don’t even attempt to put a positive spin on the events. Wikipedia says this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tiananmen_Square_protests_of_1989#Continuing_issues

Side note – while I was looking on Wikipedia for info about this to supplement my memory, the hotel wireless dropped, and punted me off of my VPN connection back to the US – it does this after a few minutes of inactivity. I decided that since I wasn’t doing anything that required me to log in, I’d just do without the VPN. I wasn’t really thinking about the content… The first time I Googled Tien’anmen square’s Wikipedia entry, I got results (from Google.cn) and was able to hit the Wikipedia page with no problem. By the time I clicked the link to “Tank Man” I was unable to get to it, and when I clicked back to go back to the referring article, I couldn’t reach that anymore either until I fired my VPN back up. *shudder* End of experiment.

I walked for about 3 or 4 more kilometers down the same road, passed some shopping districts, other hotels and just sort of wandered around looking at the sights. The street was lined with Gingko trees, which were all showing their fall yellow color, so it was pretty nice. When I say shopping, I was sort of planning on walking to the Silk market, but I never did find it. This was obviously the high-end shopping district – Burberry, Mont Blanc, Tiffany’s, etc. I also saw what I think was a Porsche dealer (other side of the street and hard to get to from where I was), and the “Audi Forum” which was on my side of the street and open. In the front of the showroom, it had: A Q7 V12 TDi, an S5, an R8 V10 in both regular AND convertible, all in the same copper color. I got tired of walking and grabbed a cab around 4pm. The sun was going down – it gets dark here about 5pm right now, and it was pretty obvious that I was running out of things to see, so I called it a day. Plus, I noted that the haze had been getting progressively worse all day. First thing in the morning, it’s bright and clear and you get probably 2 miles or more of visibility. By evening, it’s more like ¼ mile. As it was, when I got to Tien’anmen, I couldn’t see Mao’s mausoleum clearly from the gate. 

I had to go to a nearby hotel and grab a cab from the taxi stand, because I was having trouble hailing one just on the street. One cabbie actually waved me off!

The only English I spoke while out wandering around today was from people trying to either sell me their services as a tour guide, a trip to the Great Wall, or convince me to come see their “student art exhibition” which after the first time, I learned had the subtext “where I can purchase many great Chinese paintings for low, low prices” and that likely while some of the “students” were claiming that they had painted certain ones, you could find the same exact paintings at other shops for a quarter of the price. Some colleagues told of “students” that were near tears, and said that if they didn’t sell a certain number of paintings that they couldn’t continue school, so this is apparently quite the racket.  I did have one person ask me what my “2+2=5, For extremely large values of 2” shirt meant. That wasn’t easy to explain through the language barrier. I learned after the fact that apparently the very friendly English speaking women that I was chatting with that were supposedly on Holiday from some other part of China were also trying to play a game, whereby they say that they were just about to go to “a tea house nearby” and they invite you along for some coffee or tea. If you go, they expect you to pay, and often the costs are multiple hundreds of Yuan. I guess they perfected this whole “fleece the tourists” thing when everyone was here for the Olympics.

I wanted to get out of the hotel for dinner, so I asked the concierge to recommend a place within walking distance. He recommended a place that he said they [the hotel staff] often go for meals, that it was good, cheap food. He mentioned that they didn’t have English menus, but did have picture menus, so I figured I’d give it a try. I walked past some street vendors cooking food in carts, and briefly considered trying my luck there, but figured after having sushi and raw oysters at the buffet last night with no ill effects, I should probably give my system a day or two to adjust to the local bacteria before pressing my luck quite that much.

I don’t think that I actually ended up where he recommended, because as far as I can tell the Chinese characters he wrote down didn’t match the sign of the restaurant that I ended up going to, but I still enjoyed my meal immensely. (update, apparently this was his recommendation, because the same guy recommended it again later in the week, and I confirmed that it was the place with the red lanterns).

I ordered a Yan Jing beer, which is a nice crisp lager – very little bitterness or hops, reminds me of Miller High Life. It was in a 500 ml bottle (16 oz), and cost me all of $2. This, I could get used to! I also ordered something that they called Chicken and Peanut, but looked to me like Kung Pao, and a bowl of Hot and Sour soup. The waitress also pointed to fried rice, and so I nodded for that, thinking it was a side dish. Then, they brought out my food, and my jaw dropped. Each of the items I ordered would have fed at least two people by themselves. The soup bowl was probably 32 oz, and then there was a full plate mounded with shrimp fried rice, and another with my chicken. I managed to eat about half of each of the entrees, and one small bowl of the soup before I was so full I could barely walk. The whole meal was 50 RMB, which is about $7.50, and it was very tasty. The chicken was the right combination of spicy and savory, and had a lot of very large (thumb-sized) white scallions in it. Other interesting things about this restaurant – the waitstaff used devices that looked like little Blackberries to enter orders, and there was a button on your table you could use to call them, to ask for water, or to ask for the check. When I asked for water, I got a pot of hot water. I knew tea was popular, but that seemed a bit strange to me. I headed for the hotel and began working on typing up the days’ events while they were still fresh in my mind. Tomorrow starts IETF activities, so I’m hoping for another good night’s rest.