Corgi Ponchos

We met Dr. Yin for lunch yesterday. Dr. Yin is a neuroscientist at Columbia University in New York, and the husband of my grandfather’s acupuncturist. He is here in China taking care of his aging father, so my mother asked him to meet with us.

Not only did Dr. Yin meet us for lunch, he made a special trip to Beijing to see us, waited for fifteen minutes when our driver got lost, and paid for the entire meal (consisting of Peking Duck, walnut & sprout salad, tofu with noodles, and mushrooms with baby bok choy) under the guise of using the “bathroom.” So we are extremely thankful for the opportunity to meet him, and to see a new section of Beijing we had not yet visited. We do, however, need to have a little chat with my mother about her Imposition. To paraphrase Mel Brooks in History of the World Part I: “Torquemada? You can’t torque her out of anything!”

Dr. Yin is staying just outside of the Second Ring Road in southwest Beijing. Twenty years ago, the Second Ring Road marked the border of Beijing proper, and everything beyond it was seen as the countryside. Today, however, Beijing extends all the way out the Sixth Ring Road, which is about an hours’ drive from Tian’an Men, and extends all the way out to the Great Wall of China. The Haidian District, where we live, was once thought to be so far from Beijing that the emperors built a special palace there for their summer vacations. But there’s been enough development in Beijing over the past 20 years that Haidian now lies within the city limits, and one cannot distinguish southwest Beijing, where Dr. Yin is staying, from the rest of the city.

Unlike Haidian, which is extremely urban, the area where Dr. Yin is staying has wide avenues, beautiful foliage, and a number of museums and government buildings. These include the old headquarters of CCTV, a nondescript but monolithic pink marble building marked only as a “military zone,” and the Military Museum. We did not get a chance to go inside the Military Museum, because we had another appointment, but evidently the most prized possession of the Military Museum is a Russian-made Chinese fighter jet that accomplished the impossible: shooting down an American warplane during the Korean War. We’ll have to head back there sometime this fall to see the rest, because the Military Museum is supposed to be the most interesting tourist attraction in Beijing, once you finish with the Great Wall/Forbidden City/Summer Palace trifecta.

With regards to the Korean War, however, Dr. Yin told us during lunch that Chinese instructors teach a very different version of events than American instructors. Evidently the differences are comparable to how the Civil War is taught in the United States: students in northern states learn that the Civil War was fought over slavery, while students in the south learn that the War of Northern Aggression was fought over “states’ rights,” a euphemism so revisionist in content that some Yankees question the intelligence of their Confederate brethren. In China, students learn that the Korean War was actually a war between the Americans and the Chinese, whereas students in the United States learn that while the Chinese helped to defend North Korea and the United States bolstered South Korean forces, in actuality the demilitarized zone along the 38th parallel exists largely because of the Cold War between the United States and Russia; in essence, American professors largely gloss over the Chinese involvement. In China, however, the war is still known as 抗美援朝. (Literally, the "War to Resist America and Aid Korea")

It’s funny, though: to most people of our generation, fighting for democracy against communism seems like a somewhat odd concept. I was born in 1978, so I witnessed the fall of the Berlin Wall and the Tian'an Men "incident," not to mention Boris Yeltsin removing the CCCP from power with a tank. But communism was never really an understandable and tangible threat during my lifetime, because we never hid under desks, and because the Communist Bloc evaporated during my childhood. Last night, however, we watched The Lives of Others, a German film about Communism in East Germany. (If you have not yet seen it, I highly recommend a rental, assuming it's out in the States) If ever a film has accurately depicted life under the thumb of a socialist dictatorship, I bet it's this one. I'm surprised it was even available here in China, let alone in the top foreign grocery store in Beijing.

Speaking of the top foreign grocery store in Beijing, we stopped by Jenny Lou's after finishing up our immunizations for Japanese Encephalitis and Rabies. We are now fully stocked with goods for our "We Passed the Bar!!!" party on Sunday, which looks like it will be well attended. More importantly, however, we won't get rabies while in China. While in Sanlitun, we picked up the October issue of "That's Beijing" which contains an interview with Professor David Tool, the man responsible for correcting all of the "Chinglish" signs in Beijing in time for the Olympics. My favorite quote is this one:

Professor Tool is not the sort of person with whom you want to make light of English malapropisms. And yet even he sometimes has to admit that, yes, the material he's working with is pretty good stuff. "'The Dongda Anus Hospital' is funny. 'Garden of Curled Poo' is funny. 'Don't fall down.' All those things," he says.
...
It was a visit by him to [the Dongda Anus Hospital] that led to its name change. "We're talking about a huge sign - the letters were bigger than me. But within a week they changed it."

Needless to say, between the professor's name and the signs mentioned in the article, Katie and I got a good chuckle out of this month's issue.

In other news, someone just posted some pretty interesting survey results to the China Law Listserv. In terms of ease, China ranks 20th for enforcing contracts, 168th for paying taxes, and 175th for dealing with licenses out of the 200 some-odd nations. It's amazing what foreign companies will deal with for the sake of cheap labor.

Over at China Business Law, Brad Luo has a great post on drafting arbitration clauses for international deals. Arbitral agreements are extremely important in dealing with China because Chinese courts will not respect foreign court judgments, thereby leaving parties with default judgments from the United States largely high and dry. Chinese courts will, however, enforce foreign arbitration awards, because China is a signatory to the New York Convention. So, check out Luo's post--it's a great primer on what's required in executing a cross-border transaction involving Chinese parties.

In non-legal news, enjoy this video of our neighbor walking his corgi in the rain. Normally I wouldn't care about such things, but corgis are a particularly funny-looking breed, made even funnier-looking when wearing a special corgi-sized dog poncho and playing fetch with a water bottle.


Oh, and our Internet service is working again, so please disregard my earlier email.