"Mum, I really want to blow up the madhouse and rescue you"--- A 9 year old little boy to his beloved mother, Ms. Gonglai Zhang

1. Lingdao: Pregnancy Is Not Allowed

   
   Gonglai Zhang was a teacher working in a Kindergarten. When she was 32 years old, she was pregnant. However, the Lingdao in their Kindergarten (Lingdao is a very subtle word in Chinese, it has similar meaning with "Leader", but much profound than that. It suggests a hint of power,  arrogance together with ignorance. In a kindergarten, Lingdao should be the principal; in a government, anyone with higher official level should be called Lingdao) forbid her to give birth to the baby, even if it is her 1st child. According to the Lingdao
" there were not many teachers available so giving birth to the child does bad to the Kindergarten."

 

The one on the very left is Ms. Gonglai Zhang

2. Lose Job
    At that time, she had already been carrying the baby for 6 months. It was dangerous to abort. She has determined to give birth to the child anyway, which made the Lingdao felt being ignored and became angry. she lost her job without any compensation but a newly born baby.

 She likes painting very much.


In this situation, she complaint the misbehavior of their Lingdao of the kindergarten to the Women's Federation in their city. As any other bureaucracy, the Women's Federation really doesn't care much , but still asked her to go back work and reconcile with the Lingdao in the Kindergarten.

    She then worked for 3 months, but didn't get any payment, and went back to the Women's Federation again. Women's Federation did nothing but mock, that if she was bullied and not satisfied, she can simply walk away and change for another work. That's the par she cannot understand and it was the beginning part of  her doomed fate.

 3. Start Appealing (Shang-Fang)

She doesn't understand why they dealt with this issue like that, and started the road of appealing, where "Shang-Fang" may be more appropriate. Several more bkg knowledge:

   In China, when citizens have conflict with government, many people turn to "Shang-Fang" since local court is not trustworthy (No Separation of powers). They go to the Shang-Fang office established by higher level government to complain the problem with local government. However, even in this situation, it seldom works, because the Shang-Fang office usually notifies the local government to take care of the problem, but not forceful , and leave the resolution of the problem back to local. government again.

Many local officials are afraid of people Shang-Fang to Beijing (so their political future will be hampered), so they secretly built many Black Jails to catch the "ShangFangers" back to local before they can arrive at ShangFang Office.

4. Forced into Madhouse

  In any case, Gonglai Zhang's ShangFang to the Provincial Government makes the local Women's Federation (also a part of the Municipal government) very, very upset, so they decided to put her into a Madhouse, and treated her as psychosis. In order to put her into the madhouse, they don't even need the signatures of her family- the signature from the Lingdao of the Kindergarten is enough.

 

 The notification from the Madhouse, with only signature from the Lingdaos of the Kindergarten. Actually, This Kindergarten is called "2nd Kindergarten attached to Women's Federation." This clear shows that she is put into Madhouse.

There is one thing worth mentioning, that to put ShangFangers into Madhouse is widely used, it happens on many people everyday, in every city in China. Fortunately this forced-Psychosis is abandoned since this 2103 May, see in here.

   During her life in the Madhouse, she was forced to be injected a lot of medication and etc. which ruined her nervous system.The local government paid tens of thousands RMB (at that time 1USE=8RMB) psychotropic drugs, but in the meantime she suffered from many other diseases in her heart, stomach, lung, but none of them are taken care at all.

The photo is taken in the Madhouse. She is the one on the right.

5. To Beijing
  She was escaped during the transition to another hospital, and her family brought to AnDing Hospital in Beijing, one of the best hospital in China. The doctor gave a conclusion and she has no psychotropic problem. However, she was soon caught back, and forced to use the drugs continually.

The doctor's document in Beijing AnDing Hospital to show that she is not psychosis.This definitely contradicts the previous conclusion from local madhouse.

6. Sentence to prison

   What makes her nightmare begins is during her ShangFang to Beijing. Based on the diagnosis from Beijing, she is normal. But she was put into Madhouse for years (intermittently), so she was determined to ShangFang again, not to provincial government, but to Beijing directly.

   One very weird thing happened. One day, someone came up and beat her with no reason, and when she tried to defend herself, that person claimed to get hurt immediately. Then police came and said she hurt a person and had to take the criminal responsibility. It's wierd- according to the local diagnosis, she should be a "psychiatric patients", while a person with psychosis cannot to take the criminal responsibility. At the time, the legal medical expert of the local court gave another proof that she was totally OK without psychosis. That's why she was put into prison. 

The day when she is released from the prison. 

   

Notice: The entire story is full of horrible details, also the story is shortened.

What "Cheng-Guan" is?

"Chengguan" is an important element to understand the urban China. It is directly translated as City Enforcement Bureau, which is explained here.

Basically, it wipes away small vendors or pedlars on the streets, and for many time Chengguan would just confiscate all the goods. From time to time, they also resort to violence without any punishment.

Thanks to smart phone, video is much easier to take. Here is a famous affair happened very recently, In Yan-An, a small city in the northwestern part of China. There are numerous violent affairs happening in every city every day, some with videos available can be found in youtube.

On the other hand, the confiscation makes the Chengguan rich. In the above-mentioned small city Yan-An, the Building for the Chengguan is a 30-floor building.

 The four Chinese Characters on the top of the building means "Chengguan Edifice".

Largest Exam in the World: China College Entrance Exam

In order to understand real China, one must-known is its Crucial College Exam. Here is a photo, that High School senior students throw away all their learning material after the exam, in order to vent their long- suppressed emotions. 

How many learning and reviewing materials do they actually have (and awaits to be thrown away)? Just see: 

Or this, pic taken during an exam:

 Now you can understand why they are so angry about the exam, which left nothing but taking exams in their youth:


Young lovers walking on the snow-white carpet- isn't it romantic?



Unlike US middle school, in China, one classroom can accommodate  as many as 150 students. Usually, students with better scores will be arranged closer to the blackboard.

 Parents are welcoming and inspiring the students, who are ine buses heading for the College Entrance Exam:


Due to a tight schedule (you'll see how tight it is), students have to eat dinner outside the school gate:

 How does the the dinner come from? Chinese parents cook it and carry it to the gate of school, no matter windy or rainy: 

Some parents even quit job, and take care for their only son or daughter for full time. Here is the kitchen many parents are sharing to do such cooking:

Now we can tell a little bit more about the schedule:
5:30 get up,
6:30-11:30 morning class,
11:30-1:30pm noon rest (many places are shorter than that)
1:30pm-5:30pm afternoon claas
6:00pm-10:30pm even individual stud, like 16 hours per day. 

Even they study so hard, the Exam itself is too cruel to reward most of them. Everything, there are about 10 million high school grads, but Two of the best universities, Peking and Tsinghua, will take no more than 6000 among these 10 million. In some provinces, it is like 70 people in 700 thousand exam takers, 1 over 10 thousand.

Constitutionalism is for Capitalists

Recently, a famous CCP (Chinese Communism Party ) journal "Red Flag" posts an editorial (see in here in Chinese), which shocks everyone: "Constitutionalism is for Capitalists, not for Socialism". Basically, it argues that the institution of China is much better than Separation of Powers and other essential elements of Constitutionalism. It also claims 

"Western political concepts like separation of powers are alien and unsuited to China,"

 "Hold on to sacred Party spirit, as a Christian believes in God."

 More quotes (in English) can be found here and here.

This is only part of the story. Now there is a new article in the journal called"Party Building", it asks people to recognize the deceptive nature of Constitutionalism:

"The assertion of Constitutional is very clear, it is aimed to abolish the Chinese Communist Party's leadership, to subvert the Socialist regime." 

Few more words. In China, the reason to bring about Constitutionalism is simple- all laws should obey the Constitution. There are horrors happening in China, such as  "Forced Demolition", where the homes of tens of millions of people are dismantled by brutal force by Real Estate Developers together with local government. Many people are killed or committed suicide of this. This Forced Demolition is against the Constitution of China, but since CCP never initiated one single Unconstitutional Reviewing, many people are struggling to appeal for Constitutionalism.

Learn to Understand A Real China: An Introduction of Basic Rules

This blog intends to introduce you a Real China, in a realistic and unbiased way. At the beginning, one should bear in mind several very important basic rules in order to achieve a real understanding. The explanations will be given later:
In order to learn what are really happening in China, one would: 

1. Be very cautious what you read, see or hear from Chinese Media.
2. Be cautious about what you heard from Chinese classmates/colleagues about China's development.
3. Almost never believe the posted replies to a negative news in China by "Chinese people".
4. Forget about Beijing or Shanghai, they are not real China. 
5. Never ever believe in data of China published by Chinese government.


1. Be very cautious what you read, see or hear from Chinese Media.
1) There are intensive censorship- what can be published are under strict control by the Propaganda Department at each level of government.
e.g.1. "New Year Greeting Incident" in Jan 2013, can be found here and here.

2) Within such censorship, they focus on so-called "Positive News", which occurs 1 over 1 million, but ignores "Negative News".
e.g.2 Huaxi Village. There is at most one village as rich as this at each province (there are ~30 provinces in total), while when the news talks about rural development, Huaxi appears every time.
e.g.3. Gunshot in US became Top News in "News Feeds"(largest TV news in China), see comments here and here (in Chinese), however at the same time there are also several accidents in China with more people killed are deliberately ignored by all media. 

3) Much worse than censorship: all newspapers, TVs, magazines etc are indeed government owned. Some online portals are private-owned, but none of them is allowed to write their own reportage: they can only cite Official Media, but cannot make their own interview.
e.g.  "People's Daily" directly obeys from the central authority of China, and the president of People's Daily has the administrative level equal to a  minister- In China a minister more or less equals to the governor of some important provinces （see  here for more info, in Chinese）.

4) Notice: Be aware of some Chinese medias published in English, including "People's Daily", "Global Times" and "XinhuaNet". Those who have English version are very close to the central government.
e.g.4. "Global Times" once said "China people must permit moderate corruption, the public should understand", see here.

2. Be cautious about what you heard from Chinese classmates/colleagues about China's development.

1) Most of Chinese people around you come from upper-class(that's why they can afford studying abroad). Their parents are either government dignities or successful businessmen (Feel free to ask, some will tell you proudly). There is one simple criteria:
Family wealth & power rank: 
HighSchools ~ Undergrads > Master >> PhDs.

Basically, families who can afford them such high tuition fee for high school to master in UK or US comes from very rich family- either government or business. For PhDs, they usually come from ordinary families and do research.


   Those people from such families cannot represent the opinions of ordinary Chinese people.
e.g.5.  What do they do in UK and US (they are all from high-level families): 
a. Dissertation Bribing and Gun threatening
b. Rape and parents trying to bribe victim
c. Vehicular Homicide:  $2M bail!


2) The other reason is subtle. Even they are from ordinary families, and do research, they are still very cautious to tell any negative words to China, for their own safety. Most of them chose an aloof attitude: they know what is going on, but they pretend not to care because it is not happening on themselves, and (they think) there is nothing they can do.
e.g.6. in LA or Toronto, there are "Mistress Village" exist: see here and here. It becomes incredibly popular that young girls become "2nd wives(directly translated as ‘2nd breasts’  in Chinese)" of old rich businessmen or government officers (most of them cannot be regarded as dignities ).

3. Almost never believe the posted replies to a negative news in China by "Chinese people".
 When viewing youtube, or fb, or anywhere else where news can be commented, there are always people from China trying to defend the country like patriots. However, it is almost 100% caused by "50 cent party", see here for explanation. They are" Internet commentators hired by the Chinese government to post comments favorable towards party policies in an attempt to shape and sway public opinion on Internet message boards."

    There are just too many of them, at least hundreds of them at each county, each university. Most of them focus on domestic issue, but some with special training post comments outside GFW- actually ordinary Chinese people do not have a chance to surf Facebook, nor Youtube, nor Twitter, nor Google, till today due to GFW. Since 50-cent parties are trained to response quickly, it is not surprising to see many news are even occupied by their perspective- pretend to be people but official indeed.
Thus, be alert, don't buy them.

4. Forget about Beijing or Shanghai, they are not real China.
1) There is only 1 Beijing, 1 Shanghai, but there are at least 100 million people living under Chinese's absolute poverty line ($0.55, lower than UN $1/day), see here and here.
2) In rural part of China (e.g. 100 miles away from Beijing), there is still no tap water nor flushing-away toilet. People have to get water from river (if any) or underground, and deal with soil in a very old fashioned way. There is a witticism in China, "City is like Europe, Countryside is like Africa."


5. Never ever believe in data of China published by Chinese government.
Seldom data can be believed. For instance, the birth rate. In one region, if the birth rate is too high, the local government may be regarded as failure to obey One-Child Policy, while it is too lower, than the grants from higher governments will be cut. Thus, local government has to manipulate the birth data by maximizing the grants, and can be far away from truth. Not only birth data,  Export data faking also exists, also can be seen from here .
 Even in such situation, many data, such as water pollution, or environmental evaluation of Three Gorges Project, are still treated as state secret.

 
 Based on above reasons, one should be wary when hearing anything about China, due to the lack of reliable sources. A very large protest between citizens and military police (they are indeed army, but since 1989, a new type of army with the name Armed Police is established in order to evade the accusation of abuse of army) may end up repression and blood, but appears in no newspaper. What's worse, when people ask for help online, the posts will be deleted within a short time with extra risk for jail.   

  This blog will do its best to convey latest news in China, to capture the fleeting truism before its deletion, to tell you what is really happening in China- the country with 2nd largest economy together with largest poverty.