Tuesday, November 20, 2007

Meet the Bureaucracy

So tomorrow the leasing agent who found me my apartment is taking me on a tour of the western hospitals.  They’re not really a realtor in the sense that we understand them in America.  Basically my company hires the management company to handle the housing and residency issues for their employees.  The management company then finds available apartments and shows them to the employees, in this case me.  When I find one I like it is actually the management company who signs the lease with the landlord, not me.  My company gives me a generous stipend for housing, which is paid every month to the management company who are technically the renters of the apartment.  Any costs for the apartment which are over and above the stipend amount are deducted from my salary and paid to the management company.  To put it in simple terms, I’m paying someone to rent an apartment for me, handle all the paperwork, and all I do is live in it.  The reason they do this is the labyrinthine bureaucracy in this country when it comes to property law, especially where it concerns foreigners.  The added benefit is that since the money is paid directly from my employer to the management company, it’s not “deducted” from my check, it’s just paid to them instead of me, so I don’t get taxed on it.

Let’s say I was making $5,000 a month and my portion of my housing expenses was $500 a month.  That $500 would never be paid to me, it would go directly to the management company, so I only get taxed on $4,500.  It’s like getting a 100% deduction of your housing expenses on your income.

So, anyway, I asked to see what the hospitals were like.  Everyone I know who has been to them has had nothing but wonderful things to say about them, probably because they’re private and for-profit, rather than some government run utopian “free” hospital.  What I’m curious about is the access to the medications I take to control my OCD.  When I came over here I brought a three month supply with me, so I’ve got plenty of meds to stop me going apeshit, but I want to see if I can get them here in China.  If not I’ll have to buy them in the US and get them shipped over here, which is a HUGE pain in the ass because China has serious rules about importing prescription medication.  I’d have to get an import license from the Bureau of Health and Sanitation or some damn thing, a real nightmare, so you can see why I want to get the ball rolling on this now rather than when I have a week of medications left.

Then on Thursday morning the same management company is picking me up in the morning to take me to the police to file my official residency paperwork, the final step in making me an official resident of Beijing.