Category Archives: News 新闻

News!

Happy New Year

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10

Just managed to get back into this site after the Chinese internet meltdown. Its amazing how an earthquake far, far away near Taiwan can have such a huge influence on the internet connections up here in dongbei. For the last week all sites not on Chinese servers have been almost inaccessible to people with connections on China Telecom or China Netcom -which is almost everyone outside the educationet.

MSN doesn’t work and keeps on crashing my computer! Apparently, some underwater cables were damaged but its amazing just how crippled the system has become here in Changchun. Ironically, my ultra-slow university connection is seemingly unaffected and so I still have access to at least my email! 🙂

我二十五岁了！

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6

 So it was my birthday on Monday. Didn’t do anything special, spent most of the morning sleeping as It was the first day in over two months that I haven’t had to get up at some ghastly hour in the morning. 

  Did receieve a very nice cake from the department and a free meal – a very nice touch and somthing that I didn’t expect. 🙂    When I went downstairs they actually knew it was my birthday and congratulated me, I was taken aback.  I would never have expected this, not in China.  

Organisation is hardly a stong point of Chinese universities – At a previous school the administration didn’t even know my name – even after working there for a year!  I assumed it was the same everywhere, how wrong I was.    

The class I had that evening pleasantly surprised me by singing a rendition of ‘生日快乐’’Happy Birthday’  when I entered the classroom.  Which made my day!! 🙂      

Moving on –  I haven’t been able to post on-line for a while due to the university internet connection firewalling this site, so I’m currently writing from my local internet bar.  It’s really frustrating but I’m told that it’s because the uni doesn’t like people looking at external sites as they pay money for the amount of bandwidth they use outside Chinese IP addresses.  It’s nothing to do with the government clamping down,  it’s simply a cost-saving exercise!   Fortunatly the students have set up a system whereby they publish daily lists of available proxies on the internal BBS system.  When the uni finds these they block them, then some new proxies are published and then blocked and so on and so forth…. 

 

firewall

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Seems that the great firewall has just become even more restrictive. Thought it might have been a temporary glitch, but for the last 3 days or so various sites that I used to have no problem surfing, suddenly became unavailable. Maybe this is only in Changchun, I’ve tried various locations, and all with the same result. 🙁

  I can’t access any google site – gmail, google.com/.co.uk all now blocked. Strangely the BBC weather site (the news site has always been blocked) is now blocked yet most of the rest of the site is still okay. 

 I wonder who decides what to filter and why.  I wonder if the people doing the filtering even understand english, because if they did, they’d realise that searching for many things in english circumnavigates their filters.  And what does a weather site have to do with anything, when the Guardian.co.uk  is still available.

 However the crappy heavily government censored google.cn still works. The firewall is still pretty weak though, didn’t take me more than about 30 seconds to access stuff the CCP would rather not let anyone see.  

 People talk about the firewall being the most sophisticated one in the world, but I have to say it really is pretty damn poor. Rather like the quality of most Chinese buildings, from the outside it looks okay, but when you actually get into it, it’s full of cracks and holes.   It only manages to stop the most basic of user, indeed almost all students know how to find and use a proxy address.  I often find myself asking them for a new IP addresses, as the government  blocks proxies when it finds them.    

google china

 

Website Upgrade

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I’ve decided that this site needs updating, so for the next few days it will be not working very well.
Plan to put lots more stuff on here- especially about teaching – when the upgrade is complete. Which will probably take longer than I think.

What Happened?

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14

Now that the dust has settled and that I am now in a safe position oncemore, I feel able to explain what has happened to me over the last few weeks.

So I quit my job. Left. Hit the road. Moved on.

I considered it imprudent to remain in my former employ for numerious reasons, and I scented this might happen some time ago; so I had to have a plan B. I will not publish what my plan B is, just yet, but in a few weeks time.

Anyway, here’s my account of what happened.

So in early November I got into a really bad situation through no fault of my own and was faced with having to get a new (legal) job. Unfortunately there were very few options available to me at the time, either to go with this one company or to go home. Simple as that.

So I chose the former, and to be honest, I have been regretting that decision for the last three months.
The company whom I was working for is called

Jilin Star International Education Institution

(四达国际教育) or chang chun si da .

As I posted before, they are legally allowed to hire foreigners and have about 30 ‘foreign’ teachers on their books.

The company has foreign managers to add an air of legitimacy for those teachers who are new to China.
Star Education has many other interests besides Foreign Teachers, it works with getting people into foreign universites – especially in New Zealand and Australia.

Don’t be fooled by the friendly foreign faces, the company is Chinese and run by Chinese people and so still operates in a very cut-throat screw you way.

Of course, they are very friendly and nice to you in person and on an individual basis i’m sure they are nice people. But as with many of my experinces here, when money (i.e salary) comes into the equation they become like a different animal, hiding behind the ‘companies interests’ .

Despite the name, this is a recruiting and farming out agency and has no school of it’s own. The company operates by placing foreign teachers into various (and mostly) government run schools; primary and middle schools that don’t have the capacity to get foreign teachers themselves.

The company makes money by getting foreigners to work for say 20 hours per week and paying the employee per the MINUTES you have in the classroom. So the company gets 150 yuan per class, and pays the teacher 62 yuan per hour. 5000 yuan/ 80 hours a month (20p/w) = 62 RMB.
So 20hours a week is more like 30hours when you factor in that most periods are 40-45minutes per class. Not to mention the amount of UNPAID travelling between classes at different locations – it soon adds up.

For example, you may have class from 8-9.30 and from 10-11.30 in the morning. Two classes, the whole morning gone – you will only get paid for 3 hours work, then you may (like me) have another two hours of class from 2-4 in the afternoon.

So come the end of the day you woke up before 7, and get home after 5 and you only get paid for 5 hours work. This makes you feel as if you are being cheated (And I am not the only one, many of the other teachers at Star also feel this way)

Remeber though that you work for the company, not the school, so you will have to work in different locations often more than one location each day. And don’t expect a weekend like the university teachers, 6 days a week is normal.

This is how the companies operate, and the lack of a regular schdule is a total KILLER on the Foreign teachers free time. You will also get phone calls asking you to work at very short notice; tomorrow, or this afternoon – and if you refuse – you’ll get another call from the boss – all very intimidating.
Essentailly you -the Foreign teacher- will be treated like a commodity, you basic rights will be infringed and it will make you very unhappy. Of course the company will not understand your plight, it’s not in their interest to support YOUR interests at the detriment of what they see as raw PROFIT.

For me that’s the crux of the arguement, Profit and greed on the part of the company. Screw the Foreigner, hire some newbee who doesn’t know, screw him, hire another etc etc etc. High staff turnover, Fast Buck – makes me sick!

So be aware!!!

However I knew this would probably happen before I signed the contract, though I never assumed it could be quite so bad. And I thought I could tough-it-out. I thought wrong.

I could just about put up with the above, but what did it for me was when they started to mess around with my salary. Not being paid my rent money was the catalyst for my leaving the company. Maybe I was looking for an excuse to leave, however It is imperative that I protect my own interests FIRST. Especially in China, as a foreign teacher- I cannot allowed myslef to be messed around oncemore.

I later learned that the reason for Star education wanting to not pay my rent money is that the company has no reserve funds, and so by depriving 30 Teachers of 800 yuan they can save 24000 yuan – that can be used to pay bills/salaries/bosses salaries etc…

Hearing this further reinforces my opinion that I made the right move.

I’m back!

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8

I’m writing this entry from a net cafe at lunch time. Many, many things have happened over the last two months, some good some not so good.

The Updates have been rather sparse recently, mainly due to my intransigence and bad mood. I haven’t had the will to write anything much less log on the net, type, add pictures etc…

Christmas, the new year and the Spring festival have all passed by. I worked on Christmas day, and the new year was also pretty low key. I spent most of Janyary working at a local primary school, wasn’t much fun and I really loathed having to get up at 6.30 to go and do it. Of course I wasn’t meant to do any childrens classes after the new year, but they said they had no other teachers, so I did them a favour, and grudgingly obliged.

The School I was working at is quite a good school out in the east of the city, but that said, it’s still a primary school. Looking back I’m glad that I have the experience of doing this, it makes me really appreciate just how much better it was last year teaching at 长师。 I used to think there were problems there, but it pales into insignificance compared to some of the things I have had to face in the past few months.

So come the end of January the Spring Festival was upon us. Two weeks of fireworks – or more accuratly – insendury devices exploding morning noon and night. I remember this from last year, and it’s really quite spectacular. Especially on night of the new year, when come midnight, the night sky is constantly lit-up for at least 2 hours by multitudes of fireworks. Really quite special, and there is nothing quite like it back home – Bonfire night doesn’t even come close!

However, after 2 weeks of banging and being woken up at 4am by explosions large enough to destroy a small farm, it gets rather annoying.

I bought some great fireworks, spent about 100元 total. Two long bazooka looking devices, one red stick of TNT （I kid you not!!) , a bag of little green mock hand-grenades, some 3000 red bangers strapped together and something akin to a Roman candle. This was more like a Roman firebomb, I almost killed myself by not retiring the full 1000 metres as required – was incredibly loud, i couldn’t hear much the next morning, except a high pitched ringing sound. Now I fully understand why these things are illegal in the UK!

So the Spring festival was a welcome break from teaching and allowed me time to re-focus my energy elsewhere; namely, what to do next semester. My job wasn’t what i had been led-to-expect, and it was making me feel really unhappy about things.

So I decided that I was no longer going to work with kids, full stop.

I could just walk-away, afterall it’s a good time of year for jobs, and the perfect time to start studying for the new semester. But at the time I thought it prudent to keep in my employers good-books and not piss him off by resigning or vanishing into thin air.

However my decision was made for me when a couple of days into February I got a call from him. He said that there was no work available during Feb (except kids classes at god-awful qinguha) and that he suggested I take the ‘month-off’. I said that ‘you leave me with little choice’ so i took the month off. He then went on to say they would be unable to pay for my apartment, because, I was having the ‘month-off’.

This was the final straw, and is what ultimately led to my leaving the company.
(Lesson learned: NEVER work for a company dealing with foreigm teachers in Changchun. They are all money grabbing opportunists who prey upon naive first timers/those that can’t get work elsewhere/those that have no other choice at the time (me) Please take it from me, AVOID AVOID AVOID )

So he wanted me to have the ‘month-off’ at my own expense, and still continue to honour the contract for the next semester。I think not. You can’t cherrypick which parts of the contract to enforce and which parts to ignore. You most certainly can’t threaten your teachers with visa-cancellation if they refuse to continue to work, as they did when I said i can no longer work if you keep on moving the goal posts when it suits you.
Anyway, as of last wednesday I disappeared. I changed my phone number and moved on. I said nothing of my future plans to anyone and just upped-sticks; gone.

It’s all very sad that this is how things have to be done, but doing things ‘the right way’ or as you would back home (i.e go to the authorities) , cuts no mustard here. I learnt that before and i’m not about to make the same mistake twice.
Will post more exact details later!

BTW for those that want to know My QQ address is: 125873000

David

Sheer stupidity

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This made me laugh.
Taken from China Daily.

Chinese police officers look at shells unearthed from a construction site in Changchun, Northeast China’s Jilin Province Tuesday November 8, 2005. More than 1,500 shells have been excavated since October 20, with more still lying underground. The shells, their source unknown, are filled with TNT and may explode any time, experts said

Yes, may explode at any time. Standing around looking at them is a good idea then.

Even better, lets pick them up…
pickup bomb

Here’s the full text.

Massive arms dump found in Changchun.
CHANGCHUN: More than 3,000 US made artillery shells left over from World War II have been unearthed at a building site in Changchun.

Many of the shells are still live and could explode at any time, experts said.

According to Changchun Public Security Bureau, it is the largest munitions cache ever found in the city.

“My heart jumped into my throat when I heard the news that such a large number of bombs had been buried near my home for more than 50 years and could have exploded at any time,” said one nearby resident.

“Though the police and army are on guard 24 hours, I am still worried,” she added

Half the munitions, including hand grenades, mortars and flares, have been safely disposed of, while around 1,500 are still stored on the building site, awaiting destruction.

According to a survey, which checked to a depth of two metres, there are no more weapons buried on the site.

However, making safe the excavated weapons has been hampered by the high cost of transporting them and hiring a safe place where they can be detonated, said Zhu Yu, deputy chief of the security management department of Changchun Public Security Bureau.

The first 107 shells were discovered on October 20, by a construction team working in Fanrong Road. Over the next 23 days, weapons excavated from the site continued to pile up.

Well preserved after more than 50 years underground, experts say the weapons belonged to the Kuomintang (KMT), which received military help from the United States during the 1930s and 40s.

The munitions might have been abandoned when the KMT troops withdrew from the Northeast ahead of the founding of the People’s Republic of China in 1949.

“Construction work will resume soon,” said Gui Guangli, deputy secretary-general of Changchun municipal government.

Changchun’s history over the first half of the 20th century is chequered with visits from various armies from home and abroad.

Japanese, Soviet Union and KMT forces all once called the town home.

According to Li Wansen, an 82-year-old retired policeman, the discovery of abandoned munitions in the area ties in with the city’s military past.

Okay these may be 50 odd years old, but still. Come on! Do you have a grain of common sense!
Imagine if just a few of these went off what chaos it would cause. These people don’t think about the consequences of their actions, maybe they’re just total idiots or more likely, both.

would you pick up an unexploded shell?