Archive for the ‘Chinese people’ Category

Nationality is irrelevant?

Monday, April 11th, 2011

Having grown up in the UK, graduated from universities in both the UK and Greece, having visited more than thirty countries, spent extensive periods of time in Nepal, India and Thailand before arriving in Japan, having started and managing companies in both Japan and China, having lived in Japan and China for a total of about twenty years, having studied seven languages, and having been married to somebody with a different nationality for more than a decade, I thought I had come to the conclusion that a person’s nationality—something assigned to them when they are born, and totally beyond their control—is even less relevant than their favorite color.

But, . . . recent experiences in China have forced me to reconsider my position and rethink the opinions of those that I have been denouncing for the past two decades.

Many, if not most, of the Japanese businessmen I work with have low expectations and opinions of the average Chinese. I found this to be unfair and offensive. Why judge somebody just on their nationality?

However, it has recently become clear(er) to me that China may be an exception that can no longer be ignored. It should also be emphasized that I am _NOT_ talking about the average Chinese person who has never been overseas; I am talking about those that not only speak a foreign language, but have also spent some time living abroad.

I am sure that there are many exceptions, but I am beginning to realize that the length of time a Chinese person spends overseas has little, or nothing, to do with how well they understand the people, language, or culture of that country. What is common sense to almost everyone in that country may always seem extremely foreign to the Chinese visitors. Yes, visitors! As, no matter how much time they spend “living” in another country, it seems that very few actually join the local society to an extent where they can truly understand the “common sense” and “traditions”, which form the base of the social values.

Soon I’ll give you a couple of real-life examples . . .

Leaving Japan?

Wednesday, March 23rd, 2011

Japan is currently suffering in various ways after the earthquake and subsequent tsunami and problems at the nuclear power plants. Even with the inevitable disturbances to work that these problems cause, work—as life—must go on. And so, I left for China on Friday on a business trip that had been planned for several months. As always, I flew from Fukuoka in Japan to Qingdao in China, and I took the usual shinkansen from Fukuyama to Hakata (the main train station in Fukuoka). On boarding the train, I noticed that there were more passengers than usual and much more baggage than normal. There wasn’t any space left for me to put my suitcase, so I gave it to a member of the crew to look after for me. It was obvious that many people were packing up and moving south.

I’d thought that there were a lot of people on the train, but that was nothing compared to the situation I found inside the terminal when I arrived at Fukuoka airport. The place was so crowded; it looked as though the airport’s computer system had crashed leaving everybody unable to check in. However, everything was fine, and it was simply just very busy. Instead of the normal mix of nationalities and high percentage of businessmen, Chinese families accounted for a majority of the people. Every flight was fully booked.

The lady that was next to me while we lined up to check in and the mother (who was with her young son) that sat next to me on the plane both explained that they were returning to China “just to be safe” after having lived in Japan for 20 years.

My conversations with both these people were almost identical. When I explained that I was on a normal business trip and would be returning home to Japan in a few weeks, they just stared in disbelief that I would be going back to such a dangerous place. When I arrived at the airport in Qingdao, we had to walk through a radiation detector before being allowed to proceed to immigration.

When I arrived at the office and was met by the staff, it was clear that everybody was imagining a situation far worse than that reported by the media in Japan. While there is no denying that the situation with the nuclear power reactors in Fukushima is indeed serious, the most surprising part of the week was seeing the overreaction caused by the exaggerated reports in the foreign press.

 

Problems with landlord – Part 2

Wednesday, December 1st, 2010

Following on from before . . .

After leaving China on the 30th August with the landlord threatening to have a locksmith open the door and change the lock, I returned to a busy schedule in Japan.

Two lawyers and the real estate agent assured me that not even this crazy landlord would be so stupid as to have somebody open the door without my permission as that would be a clear breach of several laws, and that the only way he could gain access to the room was if I were to open the door. Since there was no way I was going to do that, I felt sure that it would just be a problem to return to when I came back to Qingdao in October after the Chinese holiday (October 1st to 7th).

Of course, I should have learnt by now: nothing is ever that simple.

On about the 28th of September, some workmen arrived asking my staff to open the apartment above so they could replace the water meter. This was being done in every room in the building, and that in itself wasn’t a problem. What made me suspicious was that the landlord was there as well. Since the landlord was there, I told my staff that they were not to open the door, and that even if the whole building had its water turned off for an extended time, it was just because the landlord wouldn’t fulfill his legal obligations when we terminated the contract—paying me my money back!

But, the workman, a lady from the office responsible for maintaining the entire complex (six buildings), the landlord, as well as my staff all said that I should allow the water meter to be changed as it wouldn’t alter our situation. So, on the condition that the landlord left after the work was completed (about 30 minutes) and was not allowed to change the locks, I somewhat reluctantly agreed to have the door unlocked.

As soon as the door was unlocked and the water meter was being changed, the landlord had a locksmith change the locks, and told my member of staff to keep it a secret and pretend that he had done it himself during the holiday period. Apparently there was nothing she could do to stop him.

She reported the story to me that evening, and I was left with a couple of weeks to consider my alternatives about what to do with the moldy apartment for which although I didn’t even have a key, was still paying the rent. This time the landlord had really gone too far, and would surely lose any court case about it, so I decided to leave things as they were until I returned on the 8th of October, and just had a member of staff contact a local Chinese lawyer to investigate my options.

Problems with landlord – Part 1

Tuesday, August 31st, 2010

Here’s why I haven’t had time to update my blog for a while . . .

The saga started simply enough, but went on for three weeks, and isn’t really over yet. It may end up in the courts, but for now I just have to wait and see. Since it would be too long to write, let alone read, if I described all the details, I’ll just give you the outline of how I came to move the Chinese office. Not far, just to the room below!

On the 2nd August, I went into the office to find that water was flowing from the kitchen sink all the way to my desk—a distance of about 5 meters. The carpet (tiled) was soaked, and there was a lot of water on the kitchen floor. So, I immediately turned off the water at the stopcock, had a member of staff call the landlord, and we started to mop up the water, and take the carpet tiles outside to the veranda to let them dry.

The landlord came, quickly arranged for the burst pipe (below the sink) to be replaced, and then left us to finish cleaning up the mess.

Two days later the carpet tiles were dry, so we bought some glue to put them back in place. Once the carpet was back to normal, my desk and computer were brought back to their original position and we thought that it was finally over.

The office has several rooms and a total area of 160 m2. Later that afternoon, I found that there were a couple of places where the carpet was wet in the room furthest away from the kitchen. The only possible way for that to occur was if the water had flowed beneath the floorboards. It also meant that the water had to be as deep as the space beneath the floorboards.

We immediately called the landlord again, who came to see what we were describing. He just said that it would dry up if we waited a day or so, and that there wasn’t anything that could be done. Despite, our insistence that there had to be a lot of water below the floor, that the office felt very humid no matter how much we used the air conditioners, and that leaving the water would probably result in mold, the landlord just left saying that nothing needed to be done and that we should just wait.

The next day, there was more water in the other room, and the bottoms of all the exterior walls were damp. We again told the landlord that the water had to be removed or mold would be inevitable. He said that he’d think of a way to remove the water, and that we should do the same.

The landlord agreed that we could have a small hole opened in the wooden floorboards to see how much water there was, and to pump it out. So, I borrowed a pump from a friend, and we had somebody open a couple of 3 cm holes.

That is when we found out that there was 1 cm of water below the flooring. A rough calculation of 1 cm of water across 160 m2 of floor space told us that we had 1,600 liters (1.6 ton) of water below us. Even this news didn’t seem to bother the landlord who just said that we should pump out what water we could and then wait for the rest to evaporate.

So, we started pumping. After two days of pumping, and opening up a total of ten holes in the floor, we pumped out a total of over 700 liters of water, but it still left about 2 mm of water that the pump couldn’t remove.

That evening, while I was in the office alone, a man from a real estate company came to the office. He asked if we had a problem with water, and explained that the apartment below us was vacant, but that water had leaked down to the ceiling. I went with him to see the apartment below. Water had poured into one room, and was beginning to show on the ceiling of another. He gave me his business card, and I told him that I’d have the landlord contact him.

By then, it was a week since the water pipe had burst, we had lost four days of work time, and—as we had expected—mold was beginning to form on the walls. Again the landlord came to look. He saw the mold, but said it would disappear in a few days after the water evaporated, and that there wasn’t anything else that could be done. He even brought us a 20 ml syringe saying that we could use that to remove the remaining water (approx. 300 liters).

A few days later, and the mold was thriving. We called the landlord and explained that if he couldn’t remove the water, we would have to look for another office as the mold would only get worse, and we didn’t believe the water would evaporate. He said he would look into how the flooring could be lifted, the water removed, and the flooring replaced, and said that that would take a day or so.

After another couple days of silence from the landlord, we called him again to get a final decision on what he was going to do about the problem. He suggested that we temporarily move everything down to the apartment below, he would have the flooring removed, everything dried, and the flooring repaired. We could then move back in. This, however, would take “about three weeks”. I made it very clear that there was no way I could have my company close down for three weeks, that moving everything downstairs and then moving it back again would be the same as moving twice, and that I would be left homeless for the three weeks (as I stay in a room in the same apartment when I’m in Qingdao). The landlord said that was the only option available.

While it was very clear that the landlord didn’t want us to move out, it was equally clear that lifting the floorboards was the only way to remove the water, and that meant we would have to find a new office. Since the mold was now expanding its territory day by day, just waiting for it to dry was simply not an option.

That morning we called the real estate agent to ask if we could rent the apartment below. We planned to move the office area immediately, and the living quarters when the ceiling had been repaired in the apartment below. The owner of the apartment below agreed, and we signed the contract that afternoon. The next day, I paid the first year’s rent and had the wiring work started so the office could be moved a day or so later.

The office was moved on the Friday, the ceiling was repaired on the Saturday, we had somebody come to clean the new apartment on the Monday, and finished moving everything by that Monday evening.

Everything went smoothly, and all that was left was for us to end the contract with the landlord for the previous apartment. That basically meant returning the keys, etc. and having him return eight month’s rent minus a one month’s penalty for us terminating the contract midterm. That meant he owed us 37,498 RMB (520,000 JPY at a rate of 14 Yen).

However, when the landlord realized that we had already signed a new contract and would be moving out, he started claiming that we should pay for the flooring to be replaced. Even though it was his water pipe that had burst, his flooring, and he had constantly maintained that nothing needed to be done as it would all be OK after the water evaporated.

Two lawyers and the real estate company all agree that we have no responsibility to pay for the flooring and that he should return the remaining rent. He, however, seems upset that we moved out, especially to the room directly below, and refuses to return the rent.

The current situation is that we are still legally renting the previous apartment, so he cannot enter without our permission to fix it. The mold is getting worse day by day. He doesn’t have a key to the apartment as we installed a new lock for him ready to terminate the agreement.

 

He says he will just have a locksmith open the door for him and do what he wants as it is his apartment. Despite this being obviously illegal, he won’t back down, won’t even agree to pay half of the amount owed, and basically refuses to negotiate a settlement at all.

So, we are settled into the new office, which is far better than the former one, and have everything ready to either terminate the agreement, or for a court case if that becomes necessary.

Still, considering the time and expense involved in a court case, the only realistic option we had is to hold on to the keys and wait and see. If he does break in without our permission, we could call the police and/or take him to court, but nobody here really believes that either of those options would help improve the situation.

The strangest thing about this episode is how quickly the landlord’s attitude and behavior changed. He had been the ideal landlord for the two and a half years we were renting his apartment and then, as soon as we tried to end the contract, he turned into the landlord from hell.

Probably best to chalk it up to experience and get on with our work and lives in our new office. At least the address only changed from 903 to 803. Still, we still have a lot of paperwork to change the officially registered address with the various government agencies and banks, etc.

. . . To be continued . . .