Police Barged into My Room While I Was Covering Fujian Chemical Spill
caixinglobal.com
caixinglobal.com
If they are cash only, and not issuing fapiaos, it means that they have no formal registration.
For travel, mopeds are not required to have number plates, and are not triggering number plate scanners.
Cash only intercity buses also likely running informally. Tickets for regular rail are also available for cash, but lately there are reports of police doing ID checks on trains.
Telling this as helpful tips to avoid excess attention from police as a foreigner in China. Living in a big city with sizeable foreigner population is relatively easy. The only "minor" inconvenience you encounter are occasional 4am police visits to check your ID, and a broken door if you happened to be out during them. While in smaller towns, you can easily be one of, say, 20 foreigners in town, and the police attention to you will be much more "personalised." Also, get a Chinese name. It is said that foreigners with Chinese names get way less attention than people with non-Chinese names.
If I (a foreigner) enter the country and don't check in to a hotel to sleep that seems like it should be a red flag. If the authorities are tracking every usual way of traveling from point A to point B, and I move from point A to point B without using one that seems like a red flag.
Assuming all these collection processes are going to a central database somewhere, both of those things seem to be very easy queries to make.
That advice is more for people who are living in China, and don't want to be the next in line in the "and then, they came for" when they simply happen to travel to countryside.
The fact that so much of surveillance is automated, means that you risk of setting of some "smart spy detector" increases the more you do anything that leaves any digital trail. This way, if you don't leave any paper trail, that "smart spy detector" simply don't have any data to flag you with.
For the hotels, "easy to find" for you -> easy to find for the police. China is actively resisting people moving around without tracing them, so please rest assured those "spy" hotels are the first ones to file everything about you to the local police unit. I know of several anecdotal cases.
For years and years, all mopeds and scooters require plates. You can buy fake plates on Taobao, but it's a great way to get into a very big trouble, especially if you're a foreigner.
Every train and every long-distance bus are ticketed with original ID only. Maybe in some small rural train station, you can buy with a photoshopped passport copy, but certainly not in Tier-3+ cities.
In 12 years I've never ever heard of "4am" police checks. They come sometimes, they're very polite. You don't even have to open the door for them, and they will never break the door unless there is a fire or a distress call. Chinese police are lazy and wrong on many levels, but they're very very far from the Western media portrayal.
Chinese name tip is a joke. You will be registered everywhere with your passport name, and nobody ever asks for a Chinese name.
I travelled few times from Shenzhen to Heihe and back without having to produce my ID even once. Just a year ago, I went Beijing to Heihe by bus, and again I only needed cash. And you can for sure travel around Guangdong on regular rail (non CRH,) and buy plain paper tickets without any barcodes for cash at few remaining standalone ticket departments. And access to the train platform on regular rail is way laxer than on CRH.
I don't have a specific need to travel without paper trail, nevertheless, sometimes, I have a need to travel with 4+ huge bags full on electronics, maotai, clothes, and other mass consumption items whenever relatives on the other side of the border request provisions from the land plenty. And that attracts a lot of unapproving looks and solicitation of humanitarian aid by impoverished officials, security personnel, and town Bubbas.
As for moped number plates, I know that individual cities require them, and issue them themselves. There are no nationwide moped number plate system as I know. On what is Chinese interstate network, and even on toll roads, I do frequently see people riding without number plates. And if you travel on smaller roads, and not on a highway, there is close to no control, and no random ID checks.
As for 4am checks, quite a number of people in Shenzhen did get them. The famous South African youtuber SerpentZA living in Shenzhen had a number. So did few of my coworkers. And it all times, the guys coming are not your chill policemen posted at streets, but Teqin, other Chinese three letter agencies who are totally not against manhandling you face to the floor.
As for Chinese name, you know that you have a full legal right to use your legal Chinese name if you have such?
With busses it is still hit and miss. Bigger bus companies, which allow you to reserve tickets online tend to require it, and smaller "Uncle Liu Bus" type companies more than likely not.
As for train tickers, you will always be asked for an ID and given a regular blue ticket if you buy them right at the railway station these days. To get an old type pink ticket, you have to look for standalone ticket offices ran by agents. There are very, very few remaining, but they do sell legit tickets. One or two in Foshan, one in Shunde, one in Meizhou. And there is always a risky option to buy them from grannies.
And one even lesser known way is to find stations with very, very old ticket vending machines that are from 2008 or so. Those don't require IDs, and take cash. Only single digits of them are remaining in Guangdong, and whom ever knows of them don't blabber around about that.
https://www.scmp.com/news/china/society/article/2174190/chin...
China's already under intense public scrutiny. Killing a journalist, especially one who has already published the story in question, would be incredibly unwise!
One could rough her up but in most of these encounters she was in public. Many times they tried to get her alone. But she refused and had already published the story when they entered her hotel room. A beating would have been equally as unwise as killing her. Anything more intimidating than barging into her hotel room would have been a huge disaster for the Chinese government.
It seems more like they were looking for a specific person, instead of trying to intimidate directly. I'm aware of how intimidating this must have been, but they didn't say things like "show us the photos you took", or "don't discuss what you saw or else", or anything like that. She was already going to be leaving the town...
Or did they maybe want to catch her in the act of having sex with someone so they could blackmail her?
There's a strong implication that she suspected something else nefarious was being planned, which is why she kept turning down "too obvious" offers of exactly what she was in town for- but based on the behavior of the police who presumably did whatever they intended to do, it's not clear to me exactly what nefarious plan she wound up avoiding.
All in all, this is more confusing to me than anything else.
Wouldn't that be like a new zealander visiting the LA and doing something the Bloods don't like, and so the bloods barge into his hotel room on the night before he returns to new zealand and says "hey is anybody else here"? Like, what's the intimidation? He's about to be beyond their reach, and they didn't even say anything explicitly.
If it's intimidation, it's both lame, ham handed, and ineffective.
An explanation that doesn't fit your opponent's behavior COULD still be correct, but maybe there's a better explanation - I don't know.
The Chinese leadership will kill as many civilians it needs because it is the only gang in town. Unchecked power at the hands of the few results in catastrophic consequences for the citizens. I'm sure they've learned their lesson from Cultural Revolution but unable to apply those lessons because those checks and balances, once again, is unavailable because Xi decided he wants to be like Putin.
My only immediate concern is for the people of China. If Russia is a model of what a nuclear armed dictator with an inferiority complex, there's no limit to what Xi can do to his country. He's already half way there, destroying the economy and the rivals to consolidate power. He doesn't care about the well being or the economy of the country. If he did, his actions would show otherwise.
> If it's intimidation, it's both lame, ham handed, and ineffective.
The intimidation is that they've shown interest in her and that they can get to her. It appears that she may have been a Chinese citizen (her account is translated), and Chinese people who annoy government officials in China may eventually be disappear into prison.
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/07/25/magazine/the-lonely-crusa...
Though the the surveillance and offers of transportation/"help" throughout the article appear to be about her, I think the real desire was to see who it was that she talked to and what they said.
That idea doesn't make any sense. They didn't search other rooms, and this person was a journalist that was covering a story that's more than likely embarrassing to one of their superiors.
It seems like they wanted to threaten and intimidate her in a deniable way. Their excuse was flimsy by design.
You definitely seem like you're trying to manufacture a theory, but nothing you've written "better fits all the facts."
At best, I think you're operating under a set of faulty assumptions that's causing you to mistakenly reject most likely explanation.
Maybe she thought that listening to the official story would be a waste of time and that they would only try to pressure her. But knowing where the official story differs from what she personally observed, and what kind of changes in her reporting they'd have demanded, would have been interesting in itself.