This weekend our program is organizing a trip to Dandong, a tourist destination really only because of its location directly across the river from North Korea. According to Lonely Planet, there's a train which passes by about four days a week from Moscow to Pyongyang, going through Dandong at 7:30 in the morning. If you were a citizen of a country which North Korea grants visas to, (which I'm most definitely not), you could be in Pyongyang in time for dinner. Kind of a crazy thought! In any case, I'm not planning on taking any long swims in uncharted waters.
Classes are going on much the same as always, though I wish it were tomorrow right now and not today, because I still have to write a 500 character essay tonight, and I currently have absolutely no idea what I'm going to write about. I mean, I have kind of a general idea, but that's still a long ways away from putting words on paper. Especially when they're Chinese words, and half the battle is figuring out not only what you want to say, but if you even know how to say it. We're leaving Harbin at 7:45 tomorrow night and taking the night train to Dandong - getting the day off from classes on Friday, which is nice.
We've been studying the Chinese legal system (or lack thereof) in "special class" recently, and today's discussion really threw me for a loop. Really, it's not only today's discussion, but the discussion I had with my one-on-one teacher yesterday as well. I know I've said before that the whole Chinese system of government is based more on whim than law, but you really don't comprehend it until you see how it affects people personally. In my case, my one-on-one teacher's attempts to arrange for me and another student to tour a Chinese courthouse are becoming more and more frustrating - it is difficult to get permission for foreigners to visit courtrooms (my teacher, in a rare moment of candor, told me "there are a lot of things that go on in Chinese courtrooms that normal people don't know about...") -- in any case, visits need to be arranged beforehand, to ensure that nothing is seen that shouldn't be, and ever since the American government started cracking down on intellectual property rights violations in China, Americans are no longer welcome in Chinese courtrooms. My "special class" teacher thought I was making this up when I told her, but I repeated to her what my teacher told me: "If you were Canadian or British it would be no problem, but you've got an American passport, so they're not going to let you in." Apparently, Microsoft has started alerting users when they're using pirated software by asking them to upgrade to a newer version on the Microsoft website, which then installs some kind of blue star on the screen which tells the user, in no uncertain terms, "YOU ARE USING PIRATED SOFTWARE!" My teacher knew about this from his own first-hand experience - apparently, being an intellectual property rights instructor for the Harbin city police department is no excuse for not buying pirated software yourself. He's kind of annoyed about the new blue star, though, and apparently so is the Chinese government (or whoever made the totally arbitrary decision to bar all Americans from the courts). My teacher rather jokingly suggested that the only way I would get to see the inside of a Chinese courtroom was if I went out and stole a car - my counter-suggestion was to accuse my classmate of stealing a car, and then we BOTH would be able to get inside - probably the best solution for all parties, if it weren't so ludicrous. It's just one of many things here where you think, "that can't possibly be true..." "that can't possibly be a dog sitting in a cage attached to the back of that bicycle..." "that can't possibly be a guy with a yellow purse around his neck pedaling a bicycle while his girlfriend rides sideways on the back holding onto a computer..." and those are just examples of the things I've seen TODAY.
It's funny to joke about the enormous gaps in the legal system here, and the arbitrariness of it all, and how the Chinese only know what Miranda rights are from watching American television shows... until you realize that in China, there are no Miranda rights at all. There is no right to remain silent, there is no right to a court-appointed lawyer, and criminals are presumed guilty until proven innocent. Suspects can be jailed for an indefinite period before being brought to trial - in the case we studied in class today, a man was held for 13 years before being brought to trial and found innocent. (if you want more info on him, google "xu jingxiang" and look for http://hric-newsbrief.blogspot.com/2005_05_29_archive.html). He is now suing the state. Less fortunate was another 21-year-old man accused of murdering his wife, and executed before DNA evidence was able to exonerate him of the crime. My teacher's only comments on the above cases? "If only that man had had a lawyer in court, he might not have been executed! If only he hadn't been tortured into a confession by the police!" Such things happen in China, and they happen all too frequently. The fact that Xinhua is writing about it, however, suggests (maybe?) that reform is possible. I don't know. It's all too easy to get incredibly frustrated with all the things that happen here that shouldn't - there's just really not a lot of room for error in a system as unforgiving as this one. For example, I recently found out from our program leader that the student who pulled the fire extinguisher on Saturday night, had he been Chinese, would have faced immediate expulsion from the university and police charges. Being expelled from school is virtually the equivalent of a death sentence here - under Chinese law, you cannot reapply to college, and with no college degree... what are you going to do? According to my roommate, committing suicide after flunking out of school here is hardly unheard of - it's just also very rarely discussed.
There are a lot of things here that don't make sense - some of them funny, and a lot of them less so. As I sit here, though, staring at my computer screen and trying to figure out all the things I don't understand, I start realizing the things I do. I'm hungry, I need to do homework, and I need to make it back to the dorm without being run over by a bus. I'm going to stay on the right side of the border, the right side of the law, and somewhere along the way try and learn some Chinese. What can you do? You do what you can.
