When we laugh at something, it means that it struck a chord within us—that we really feel deeply about the subject matter. When I hear a joke in Chinese that I don’t understand, it can frustrate me because quite separate from finding the joke funny, not understanding a joke at all means that I don’t understand an important subject for Chinese people.

But today, I saw the latest video from an online series that looks at strange things in society, such as “How to become an Adult Video star” or “How to do a first date”. Today’s topic? “Foreigners’ preferential treatment from the government.”

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gqc6OPqfK_I&feature=player_embedded

I don’t want to waste any time or energy expressing frustration at the inaccuracies of the piece in its treatment of foreigners. I don’t quite feel represented by the blond-haired, blue-eyed stick-man invented to portray me, but that is to be expected.

Instead, I want to focus on the far more interesting part of this piece: how are Chinese people using the straw man of foreigners to comment on their own society?

“Preferential” obviously needs to be explained. Preferential as compared to whom? Perhaps the most interesting thing is that the piece doesn’t compare foreigners (wai guo ren) to Chinese people at large, it compares them to specifically to Chinese who move from their old homes to cities (wai di ren).

The giant subtext beneath this whole piece is that Chinese people all take part in the hukou, or household registration, system. People who are born in, say, Beijing, have Beijing registration, which endows them with a set of privileges, such as: ability to send your children to public school, have them take the Gaokao college entrance exam, ability to buy and sell real estate, to set up companies in Beijing, etc. etc.

Interestingly enough, some of the preferential treatment foreigners (wai guo ren ) receive often overlaps with these responsibilities that they and normal city residents receive but urban immigrants (wai di ren) don’t. For instance, foreigner can buy and sell property, but a wai di ren can’t. As Beijing housing prices are going up and up and up, one of the biggest social strains is how a class of property-wielding Chinese are getting wildly rich off of speculation while normal people who need houses to live in and to raise families are left behind.

The question one might ask, then, is why are Chinese people beating up on foreigners instead of complaining about the Hukou system? This is a complicated question. Firstly, the Hukou isn’t going anywhere soon—it is too useful a mechanism for the government to control internal immigration. The last decade has seen 150 million people move from countryside to cities, the largest human migration in the history of the world. It has strained, but not broken, the social fabric here. Even with the massive restraints put upon migrant workers in terms of restricted work opportunities, inability to educate their kids, and other deterrents, there has still been a massive migration. Beijing might have a population of 50 million if there were no hukou.

But the larger questions are these—economic inequality and an unofficial caste system. First, economic inequality: talk of foreigners flipping houses assumes they can buy houses in the first place. I know I can’t, and even the foreigners here on big fancy packages don’t have the spare funds to dally in real estate. The property prices in Beijing are ludicrous—for instance, my small one-room one-bath apartment is valued at $750,000 USD, more than a beautiful house in the nicest suburbs of Boston. At some point, this is stops being a foreigner-Chinese issue and becomes a rich-poor issue, and looking at foreigners as mysterious barons who sneak around the system is a convenient way to ignore the Chinese-Chinese wealth gap.

The second issue, about an unofficial caste system that has begun to take root in China, is more unique to China. The cities are where China and the West meet directly. There is public transit, huge skyscrapers, fast internet and many cultural events daily. In the countryside, things in many places go on in much the same way the did in the Qing dynasty. While a forty-year old from the countryside who has come to Beijing might have a cell phone, he doesn’t have the deep understanding of the Western world that city slickers pride themselves on. The traditional Chinese values he has lived in his whole life are being warped and adjusted in places like Beijing; he knows the wrong knowledge for this time and place. And as such, the countryside people (who Chinese refer to as Nongmin, or peasants) stick out like a sore thumb in much the same way foreigners do. But whereas the Chinese culture (through no effort of either foreigners or the peasants) gives unusually high status to foreigners, it also gives unusually low status to the countryside people. And as such, it creates what my Chinese friends describe themselves as an unofficial caste-based society.

This system is multi-leveled and complex. For instance, a young worker who went to college in a second- or third-tier city might be educated about the outside world but have never met a foreigner, making them somewhere in-between. This person is still seen a wai di ren by the Chinese, and regardless still cannot buy property or work freely in their new city. Using the foil of rich foreigners getting points for their lack of knowledge of China is a perfect way to draw sympathy from Chinese of all sorts for the struggles of their own countrymen.

While it might appear strange to a foreigner that Chinese people would simultaneously recognize the inequity of such an unofficial caste system and yet still perpetuate it, it is important to remember that many of these issues are economic and practical. Sure, it’s not right that someone from the countryside can’t do much more than physical labor in the economy of the city… but what can a socially conscious Chinese do? A boss can’t hire someone out of the goodness of their heart who can’t work, and a company won’t pick someone with a second-tier college degree above a more qualified Beijing applicant. Add in the hukou making it difficult to get hired outside of your own province, and it’s easy to see how city people empathize with migrants but can’t do much about it.

Also, it should be clear that migrant laborers do indeed enjoy their lives and have fun.

Some of the charges against foreigners are true—we do hold foreign passports, and when the air gets bad, it’s always an option to fly home. We are treated extra-courteously on the street in some ways (although it neglects to mention other ways foreigners are discriminated against). In one case, they were even more correct than they meant to be—while talking about how foreigners, “because they didn’t have enough to eat and wear in their own countries”, could avoid taxes until making 4800rmb/month, as opposed to 3500/month for Chinese. Regardless of taxes, when the starting salary of an English teacher is usually no lower than 10,000rmb/month, the idea of small tax breaks for foreigners isn’t something most of us ever consider.

But the truth of the matter is that compared to the way urban Chinese treat the new migrant Chinese, foreigners generally have it better off. In the Chinese eyes, at least we have an excuse for not knowing how to operate in modern China; if you are a middle-aged migrant worker from a farm having to learn how to operate in a big city for the first time, you will look quite silly while learning, and on the outside you still appear Chinese, which makes it easy for others to look down on you.

Ultimately, what is the big problem here? It can be traced back to the inequities of how China is growing. The pie is getting bigger daily, but who gets the pie is something regular people have no mechanism to control. If we as Americans elect leaders that wind up dallying or passing bad legislation, then that’s our fault. But if Chinese people disagree with the hukou system… what are they to do then?

We as foreigners need to temper our frustration at the way we are treated forever as outsiders here with the knowledge of how the system works for the Chinese. The fact that most Chinese are too polite to raise any of these issues with their foreign friends face-to-face makes the Chinese-language Internet perhaps the only place to see these charges laid out against us. While it makes me upset that the secret joke this time was on me, when you really parse things out, this piece is more critical of Chinese society than of foreigners.

And in the end, both foreigners and wai di ren are just people looking for a better life. We may still live in different worlds, but the more we know about each other, the better.

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