The China Megathread III: It is not a happy everyday

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Ask/Tell > Tourism & Travel > The China Megathread III: It is not a happy everyday

Be Depressive: Jul 8, 2006; "The drawings of the girls are badly proportioned and borderline pedo material. But"

JimBobDole posted:

Yeah, I'm in the US at the moment and watching the news of it. I'm wondering how this will change airport security when I get back in August.

If they did it in Terminal 2, I think it's actually possible to reach a relatively crowded enclosed space (Delta ticket counter, gently caress that whole airline) before going through security, but Terminal 3 is like a football field - there's nothing there for explosive force to impact, and everything's so spread out that even on a busy day people do not congregate in large groups.

Anyway it's nice to see that we're not getting 24-hour news coverage of the incident over here. That's the one thing I love about propagandist state media. Television is boring and all bad news is downplayed rather than blown up for ratings. There's more on the news about the Treyvon Martin protests than the Beijing bombing today.

edit: and it's interesting how much coverage they are giving to Treyvon Martin when they could be covering this eerily similar watermelon vendor beaten to death by chengguan.

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/07/21/world/asia/death-in-china-stirs-anger-over-urban-rule-enforcers.html?hp

edit2: NY Times article about ZZ nightclubs. Henan goons take note. We should go to this club.

NYTimes.com posted:

ZHENGZHOU, China � The hottest nightclub in this factory town is a neon-encrusted dive down the road from the industrial park where iPhones are made 24 hours a day. Tucked behind an open construction site, Through the Summer, as the nightspot is known, had it all on a recent Saturday night � plastic whistles, fruit plates, a toddler with a mohawk, counterfeit light sabers and a bawdy comedian who imbibed beer through his nose.

Thousands of young Chinese come to the city of Zhengzhou to work in electronics factories. To escape the monotony of the assembly line, many take up roller skating as a hobby, like at the outdoor roller rink. The Free Rollers club. In-line and roller skating has developed something of a cult following among the Foxconn strivers.

Liang Yulong, 19, who tests iPhone motherboards at the Foxconn Zhengzhou Technology Park, arrived at the club with a single goal in mind: to obliterate his dreary daytime reality on the spring-loaded dance floor. �Dancing lets me vent my anger and stress,� he said, cigarette in hand. �When I�m here, I forget everything else.�

Here on the gritty outskirts of Zhengzhou, the capital of central Henan Province, the nocturnal menagerie reveals a little-explored aspect of the global supply chain, the off-hour escapes that give the masses of workers the motivation to return to the assembly line.

The hands that make the world�s electronics belong almost entirely to young people with dreams of their own, and a lifetime of contented industrial drudgery is not among them. Their precious time off is a rare chance to enjoy the present as they strive for a better future.

�Everyone gets psyched for the weekend,� said Bai Sihai, 24, as he navigated open potholes on the way back to his dorm after work one afternoon. His plan? A video-game binge session at an Internet cafe followed by a long-distance phone call to his girlfriend.

The captains of industry are beginning to see the merits of off-hours leisure. In recent years, a wave of riots and suicides in Henan Province have drawn attention to working conditions. In April and May, two workers and a prospective employee jumped to their deaths from dormitories that cater to workers at the Zhengzhou plant, which is owned by Foxconn, the Taiwan-based manufacturing giant that produces electronics for Apple, Microsoft and other companies. Foxconn maintains that the suicides were unconnected to work at the factory. Also in May, a worker committed suicide at a Samsung plant in the southern province of Guangdong, where labor rights organizations had documented a string of violations like forced overtime and under-age workers.

The industry has responded with carrots and sticks to save both the lives of their workers and their own corporate reputations. Under pressure, Foxconn has raised wages and cut overtime hours. At the Shanghai plant run by Quanta, which makes hardware for companies including Apple, Toshiba and Asus, workers can pay for yoga and tae kwon do classes.

After the latest suicides at the Zhengzhou dormitories, the company instituted �silent mode,� which banned all talk about nonwork tasks on the factory floor. Although Foxconn later announced that it had rescinded the policy after a public outcry, workers say it remains in effect.

In the high-tech Olympus of Silicon Valley, employees in ergonomically luxuriant offices can get subsidized massages and haircuts, scale rock-climbing walls, play foosball, meditate and do Pilates � all in the name of promoting creative innovation.

The work environment is considerably more bare-bones here. Unlike Apple�s modernistic new campus in Cupertino, Calif., which will be surrounded by apricot trees, the Zhengzhou factory has all the charm of a penal colony. Employees, who must wear matching uniforms, say supervisors routinely curse and yell. In the residential compounds, rows of brick dormitories house up to eight workers in rooms filled with metal bunk beds, a combination shower-toilet, and not much else.

Perhaps that is why the world beyond the factory gates resembles a gigantic street fair. As dusk fell one night recently in Zhengzhou, Mandarin pop music blared from hair salons and couples strolled past stalls selling pirated DVDs, sliced watermelon and roses covered in silver glitter. A flatbed truck piled high with oversize stuffed animals drew a mob of young women like sharks to blood. �I want the green teddy bear,� cooed a teenage girl to her boyfriend, who dutifully handed over 10 renminbi, or $1.60.

Down the block, a construction site played host to a parade of distractions, including a tattoo parlor set up in the back of a van, arcade games with metal claws that featured a pack of cigarettes as the big prize, and a beer garden of sorts, where hordes of young factory workers chugged watery beer and chain-smoked over plates of sliced pig knuckles.

At some point, a troupe of dolled-up singers was supposed to take the nearby stage, though Luo Haojie, 20, and his friends were finding ample amusement in their shot glasses. In May, Mr. Luo quit his factory job making iPhone 5 parts, which earned him about $295 a month, including overtime. �Our supervisors are vicious,� and the cafeteria food is terrible, he said, to a round of applause from his drinking buddies.

Eventually he will need to find another job, but for now he is content to bask in the joys of youth, which means meeting girls and getting drunk with his former co-workers. �I�m here for my bros,� he said. �Without them I�d be miserable.�

Summer is the low season in China�s factory towns, so many workers get a day off on weekends, sometimes even two. There are numerous colorful characters on hand to keep them entertained. One evening, a band of itinerant performers dressed like Buddhist monks had set up shop across from a KFC-inspired eatery confusingly named Donut. Garbed in silken yellow robes, the �celebrity acrobatic snake-training talent team� worked the crowd of bored onlookers by whipping balloons and hawking blessed ornaments for rear-view mirrors. A monk with an earring blew fireballs.

�The circus that came around a few months ago was better,� said Li Yu, 19. �They had real lions and tigers.�

Those looking for more athletic diversions can usually be found at the local roller rink.

In the glow of swirling rainbow lights one Saturday, Zhou Pengzheng, 20, another iPhone 5 motherboard tester, narrowly avoided several neophytes as he spun to a halt on a pair of $160 in-line skates, which cost him roughly a third of his monthly salary. �It feels like I�m flying,� he said, before zooming once more into the throng of careening youths on tiny wheels.

In-line and roller skating has developed something of a cult following among the Foxconn strivers. A half dozen teams with names like Rainbow, F-2 and Shadow gather for weekly group skating sessions across the city.

Fang Xuema, 17, learned to skate not long after coming to work at Foxconn last spring and soon joined Team Shadow, which has around 100 members. The rink has since become her second home. A high school dropout, she quit the factory in May, because her age prohibited her from working lucrative overtime hours. �I used to come to the rink twice a week, but now I�m here every night,� said Ms. Fang, in a black miniskirt and matching nail polish.

At 11 p.m., the street performers had vanished and the love hotels were getting busy. After a long day of making iPhones, Wang Puyan, 20, and his girlfriend were heading toward their rented apartment off campus, since factory dormitories are separated by gender.

A romantic adventure was not in the cards, however. �We see each other every day at work,� he said. �Why would we go on a date?�

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/07/17/world/asia/the-demanding-off-hour-escapes-of-chinas-high-tech-workers.html

Be Depressive fucked around with this message at 06:01 on Jul 21, 2013

# ¿ Jul 21, 2013 05:43

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# ¿ May 22, 2024 19:20

Be Depressive: Jul 8, 2006; "The drawings of the girls are badly proportioned and borderline pedo material. But"

Hey Chinagoons check out this cool pictorial I saw in The Atlantic.

http://www.theatlantic.com/infocus/2013/09/scenes-from-21st-century-china/100586/

# ¿ Nov 30, 2013 07:03

Be Depressive: Jul 8, 2006; "The drawings of the girls are badly proportioned and borderline pedo material. But"

MeramJert posted:

Why? They have radio stations in China as well.

Yeah but they're all that weird gravel-voiced dude.

# ¿ Dec 3, 2013 05:47

Be Depressive: Jul 8, 2006; "The drawings of the girls are badly proportioned and borderline pedo material. But"

blinkyzero posted:

Where did you lose it? You should go back to that place, get the SIM card, and put that SIM card in your new phone.

This makes no sense. If he knew where he lost it, hence where the sim card was, he wouldn't need a new phone?

# ¿ Dec 4, 2013 03:56

Be Depressive: Jul 8, 2006; "The drawings of the girls are badly proportioned and borderline pedo material. But"

Litter can be kind of hard to find offline. I find that cat food is very easy to buy but the places that sell food often don't sell litter and the places that sell litter often don't sell cat food.

Yeah, I know.

# ¿ Dec 5, 2013 17:49

Be Depressive: Jul 8, 2006; "The drawings of the girls are badly proportioned and borderline pedo material. But"

Fall Sick and Die posted:

The purpose of those large breach penalties is not to actually charge you that money but rather to provide the justification for withholding your salary after you're fired.

Quoted for truth. It's a pretty much tried-and-true Chinese management technique - make sure your workers are always paid several weeks/a month behind so that when they leave you can keep their pay. It also causes a strong psychological motivation to not leave - doing so would essentially be admitting that you've wasted a month of your life for no reason.

For example a terrible boss (let's call him Steven) might hire teachers for a probationary period (let's say two weeks) then as a salaried employee but suddenly a month into the job you find out that you're not getting paid until next month, and by the way you're only getting full pay for the last two weeks because the probationary period was unpaid.

So then you slug it out another month, collect the paycheck, and it's less than promised. Because your work isn't up to par, you need to be doing a better job, but if you can do XYZ then next month we'll pay you full salary. At this point you can either stay or tell the owner to gently caress off, but there's a strong psychological incentive to not admit that you've wasted all this time. Because if you spend a lot of time doing something, it must be important to you. Plus Steven says you'll get full salary next month if you buckle down and do XYZ.

Of course from Steven's perspective, even if you quit he still wins because you just gave him six free weeks of labor, so gently caress you guy. There's no loving way he's going to pay you that last month's salary. Have a good time finding a new job and waiting another month to get paid.

Dipshit managers can get away with this sort of thing with their Chinese employees, so they try to do this with foreigners too. It helps to keep in mind that loving people over is pretty much what China is all about. Literally every aspect of Chinese society is based on a solid foundation of assrape.

There are managers who don't try to screw you over, but they're just being pragmatic because foreigners are difficult to deal with.

# ¿ Dec 6, 2013 17:55

Be Depressive: Jul 8, 2006; "The drawings of the girls are badly proportioned and borderline pedo material. But"

So this bar owner kept insisting that I dj at their bar and I really didn't so I just kept saying no and now I am doing a nightly gig for the next ten days at 600 a night. I've never really come out that well in bargaining before - I honestly didn't want to do it and they took that as a bargaining position.

Anyway y'all goons should all come to Luoyang Henan next Saturday we'll tear poo poo up proper, eat some sheep eyes, piss in the street.

# ¿ Dec 13, 2013 18:33

Be Depressive: Jul 8, 2006; "The drawings of the girls are badly proportioned and borderline pedo material. But"

blinkyzero posted:

Hey, Fearcotton says that FedEx (well, commie customs) did this to her once. She had prescription meds in the package. She wrote back a detailed list of everything in the box, but didn't give details on the medication. She just labeled it as over-the-counter, even though it wasn't. Not an illegal substance in China, so she figured what the hell. They then asked her to provide them with a website that had general pricing -- not for the meds, but for a freaking bag of pretzel M&Ms (delicious btw). That and about 50 RMB was all it took to jailbreak the package from customs.

I don't understand why all you people are shipping prescription meds from overseas when they are all available here for about 1/10th the price.

# ¿ Dec 24, 2013 05:18

Be Depressive: Jul 8, 2006; "The drawings of the girls are badly proportioned and borderline pedo material. But"

What's the best way to get from Hongquiao to Pudong airport? I was dumb and booked a hotel near the airport I was coming in from today, not the one I'm leaving from tomorrow. :facepalm:

# ¿ Jan 12, 2014 08:32

Be Depressive: Jul 8, 2006; "The drawings of the girls are badly proportioned and borderline pedo material. But"

Type up the letter in English yourself and give it to the program director, ask her to sign and stamp it. Don't ask her to write a letter for you.

# ¿ Jan 23, 2014 07:23

Be Depressive: Jul 8, 2006; "The drawings of the girls are badly proportioned and borderline pedo material. But"

Real Phone Talk:

I bought my wife a Xiaomi and she gave me her bigass Samsung GT-N7100 phablet, which I don't really want because it's so goddamn big, but I figure if I upgrade to Android 4.4.2 kitkat and root the phone, it will at least be useable. The current firmware has all sorts of terrible Chinese software installed that you cannot delete.

But I'm worried that Google isn't working without a vpn now, and I might end up with a phone that only works as a phone, am unable to download apps or whatever.

So what should I do? I already tried to trade it for an iphone 4s (my 3gs finally broke) at the computer market but nobody wants this thing. I figure I can use this for a while, but know nothing of custom firmwares or google play or whatever it is people do on android devices.

Help!

# ¿ Jul 28, 2014 04:21

Be Depressive: Jul 8, 2006; "The drawings of the girls are badly proportioned and borderline pedo material. But"

Haha, while Zhengzhou is equidistant from Shanghai and Beijing, it is NOT halfway between the two cities, unless you go really far out of your way.

# ¿ Jul 28, 2014 04:31

Be Depressive: Jul 8, 2006; "The drawings of the girls are badly proportioned and borderline pedo material. But"

Ok so I could theoretically get Astrill from a different app store and then use Google Play? That would work for me..

# ¿ Jul 28, 2014 04:53

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# ¿ May 22, 2024 19:20

Be Depressive: Jul 8, 2006; "The drawings of the girls are badly proportioned and borderline pedo material. But"

Hey I made another not-terrible remix of a terrible Chinese song. Enjoy, and force your chinese friends to listen!

https://soundcloud.com/insuffleupagus/feel-me-bro-90s-by

# ¿ Aug 5, 2014 08:28

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