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Our first baby is due in May.  Should our baby have British, Chinese or dual nationality?

Ideally we would like our first born child to have dual British and Chinese nationality. This would make it easy to travel and live in Europe or China without any additional visas.

I’ve just telephoned the British Consulate in Shanghai who informed that the Chinese Government does not recognise dual citizenship so we need to make a decision.

Our child will have a very mixed up international identity given the background of his or her parents. Jenny is from Shanghai, but she spent her formative years making friends from around the world and was told by a fortune teller that she would marry a foreigner.

Although I am from the UK, my parent’s family are Jewish and they originate from Germany and Eastern Europe. Our child will be born in Shanghai to a Chinese mother, but he or she will be keeping alive a European Jewish name.

The consulate officer told me that our child will automatically receive hukou or Chinese citizenship as a result of being born in China. We will also be able to apply for our child to get British citizenship and a passport given that I am a UK citizen who was born in Britain. I need to present my passport, birth certificate and my child’s records after the birth.

Our child’s nationality will change once we decide to travel on a British passport. We could choose to travel on a Chinese passport and apply for a visa whenever we go to the UK, but life is so much easier travelling on a British passport. When we arrive in the UK on a British passport our child will lose his or her Chinese citizenship. From this point on, our child will need to travel to China on a British passport and get a visa just like any other foreigner.

I know it is possible to keep two passports and keep this information from the Chinese government, but we were advised not to do this. Our child will in fact be a dual citizen, but only until their first visit overseas.

Given our multiple cross cultural identities, I find the binary logic of choosing a nationality quite strange.

It captures the communication problems, the sense of chaos, the flexible attitudes to copyright in terms of vintage BBC tv shows and web service design. America does Youtube. China does Youku

Enjoy. Tell me if it plays in the UK. There is little chance that a cease and desist letter will remove this video clip.

Here are some choices for English language short form television in China:

1. Terrestrial TV Channels

CCTV 9 is China’s state sponsored English language news and cultural programmes. Nothing here will rock the boat with Beijing and it has the distinction of hosting the most tedious TV show to have ever graced the airwaves – ‘Dialogue’

ICS is a new English and Japanese station that has some English language films such as old Sinbad films.

2. Satellite TV

Many of my colleagues pay 2000 RMB to get a dish fitted so they can watch Star Sports, BBC World and HBO Asia. We bought a second hand dish from a colleague a year ago that we have never fitted. I have no feeling for televised sport and I get all the content I need from other sources.

3. Streaming Internet Video

Youtube is the famous site for streaming video, but it can be slow as all international web traffic goes through Beijing. Hulu has great content, but you need an American VPN such as Witopia.net or Hotspot Shield to make the site think you are surfing from a US IP address, which can be slow. I would like to be able to use the BBC’s Iplayer to view UK tv shows, but you need a UK IP address for this service to work. It is only available to people in the UK. I have been having fun watching some old episodes of ‘Gordon Ramsay’s Kitchen Nightmares’ on Tudou, which is China’s answer to Youtube. Joost works in China, but it has a poor selection of content.

4. Livestation

Livestation is a piece of software that uses the Internet to stream live television from around the globe. Stations include BBC World and Al Jazeera. Sometimes the picture is jerky and buffers, but CNN works really well.

5. Torrents

Some people use torrent sites such as Pirate Bay, UK Nova or BT Junkie to download international tv shows that are otherwise unavailable in China.

6. DVDs

DVDs exist for many television shows from The Apprentice to Desperate Housewives and Battlestar Galactica. Buying a few of these will mean you have your own personal tv station. A word of warning is that many DVDs in China are pirated.

7. Video Podcasts

Go to Itunes and search for short form video. Content includes news, technology, music and comedy.

8. Itunes TV shows

People can buy and downoad TV shows if they have credit or debit cards registered in a country that has an Itunes store.

This is still an issue or I would not choose to resurrect such a gloomy old blog post. The difference these days is that I am enjoying my summer holidays. Thirty degrees celsius, a daily bike ride, all the time in the summer and plenty of sleep equip me with forgotten reserves of patience and tolerance towards all sorts of challenges and bad news.

Still, a couple of incidents have reminded me that I still have trouble understanding and being understood whether I am speaking Chinese or English.

People in this city like to speak Shanghainese or Shanghaihua. It is the language of family and back room deals. I live in a working class Chinese neighbourhood near Nanpu Bridge where Shanghainese is spoken almost exclusively. Of course all locals can speak Mandarin, but it is in a slurred accent that is supposed to be the Chinese equivalent of Geordie or Scots.

It seems that Shanghainese people over the age of 50 have great difficulty understanding foreigners mispronounce Mandarin. My spoken Chinese is still proto pidgin, but I know more than a thousand words. I can even string together multi clause sentences such as ‘Yinwei wo meiyou ya, wo bu hui chi tiandian’. (I can’t eat dessert, because I have no teeth). My wife and colleagues have no trouble understanding my laughable attempts at speaking Chinese. Unfortunately, this basic repertoire does not cut it with aging locals who just don’t understand my poor grammar and tone deaf pronunciation.

Today I tried to tell my wife’s aunt that I wanted to get a new key cut. The only way I could get her to understand was to show her a bunch of keys and get her to call my wife to translate my instructions into authentic Chinese.

It’s not just Chinese that is causing me trouble. I have started to use a phone transciption service called Jott . I tried using this service (in English) to create Google Calendar entries, E-mails to self, Remember The Milk tasks and new Evernote reminders. The Lifehacker set have been raving about this service for months, because it is free and makes use of Indian call centres to convert audio into text that is then used to update a plethora of aforementioned web services.

The idea is convenient and fascinating, although I am ethically ambivalent about a poor bugger from Bangalore transcribing my voicemail for $2 an hour. I have read the tutorials and followed the examples, but I can’t get Jott to understand my perfectly clear British English. When I tried to dictate ‘Introduction to Computer Systems’ Jott mistook my entry as ‘In seduction, that can take this.’ Maybe I need to improve my accuracy by dictating my Jott entries in the style of John Wayne.

Try it for yourself to see if you have more success with Jott than me. You need an American telephone number to start using the Jott service, but this is easy enough to setup if you become a Rebtel user, even if you are in China.

The nub of this post is that doesn’t matter if you speak good English or poor Mandarin. People will still struggle to understand so you may as well talk to your cat, which is a lot less trouble.

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Jola took some pictures of the occasion, which she assembled on a collage. You can come to Projection 216 to see Jola’s exhibition for the next few weeks. Look out later this week for pictures and video of Jenny’s latest collection.

Projection 216 Room 216, Building 3, Lane 210
Taikang Road, Shanghai, PRC
泰康 路210弄 3 号楼216 室 Tel: 021-54656616

Jola Kudela is a photographic artist based in Paris. This is her first exhibition in Shanghai. This is her bio:

“if loneliness has its God, Jola Kudela must be one of His high priests”

Jola Kudela, an international artist born in Poland, has been living and working in Paris, which became the main focal point for her works and international projects coming from India, Luxembourg, Canada or Tunisia. The precursor of neo-photography, active graphic and motion-designer, animated film director, book-illustrator, special visual effects creator for the needs of film and television. She joins the techniques not a long time ago considered as classical with the latest achievements of technology and digital image processing.

The areas to which one can categorize her know no boundaries, what she offers to the contemporary public falls outside any explicit categorization or trends. Her works never stop astonishing the public and with her artistic ideas being an inherent part of ultra-modern image of art she can truly amaze.

Loneliness in a behemoth city as well as confusion characteristic of the relationship between man and woman, the everlasting desire to experience closeness, becoming a unity, which seems to be impossible as we are limited by anxiety seem to be the main subject themes of her works. The present oscillates between constant pain and temporary refuge sought in amusement. This is the world her heroes live in – exposed to us, scared, helpless and yet, invariably heroic. Jola Kudela reminds us of a contemporary shaman leading both the characters she creates and us – the public – sneaking up into some “paper” world, the magic moments where between the sunrise and the sunset of art, every day, at some point, we may perceive both painful beauty and the everlasting truth about human existence. Petrifying and tempting , she can never be indifferent to us.

Her commitment to various dimensions and genres (from the well-known high-budget commercial productions (Tim Burton – NINE), and global projects creating new photography trends (NEO-PHOTO, IDN – Hong Kong), individual graphic art exhibitions (METROPOLIS, Paris), awarded digital cycles , panoramic photo collages (THIS IS MY HOME NOW), to street art dealing with the icons of modern pop culture ( ART MAKES YOU FREE).

Jenny will also be showcasing her new collection and designs from Eva, DK and Emma. We’re looking forward to another great party at Projection 216. Get in touch with Jenny if you want to get an invitation. Jenny has printed some great invitations, which you can see at the top of the post.

Venue: Projection 216, Room 216, Building 3, Lane 210, Taikang Road, Shanghai, PRC
泰康 路210弄 3, 号楼216 室
Tel: 021-54656616

Date and time: Sunday 15th June, 7 pm

Here is a video I shot on my way home of Dongtai Lu. It’s a well known antique market near Huai Hai Lu and Xizang Lu in downtown Shanghai.

She explained the Chinese point of view, but it sounded much more reasonable than the propaganda I see on CCTV 9, which makes me switch off. It was not the content of her views that impressed me, but her willingness to listen to and consider other perspectives.

According to her, Tibet has been on the Chinese map since the Qing dynasty and is an integral part of the country. She regards the PLA 1950 arrival as liberation. It upsets her that the protestors tried to put out the Olympic flame and that the western press is so biased in favour of Tibetan separatism, but she knows that the Chinese media is also distorted so she tries to find out the truth that lies somewhere in between.

I told her that it is quite normal for the press to appear biased when they make mistakes or present a range of views. Western journalists can be very hard when interviewing senior politicians, especially in the UK. Jeremy Paxman is famous for making public figures look like idiots on tv. We don’t like politicians in my home country and we work on the assumption that they are trying to mislead us. At least I do. This will never happen in China as long as the CCP maintains its grip on the media.

I told her it is also very normal for westerners to express dissent about anything and everything. It’s all fair game. In the UK we have folks campaigning for an independent Scotland and there is a sizeable Catholic minority in Ulster who want to leave Britain to become part of Ireland. Seeing pictures of protestors tussling with the police is also nothing new. This time British and French were getting angry about the Olympic torch.

My friend is disappointed that the idealism of the Olympics has been tarnished by politics, but this is another rehash of past events. Hitler refused to shake hands with gold medallist Jesse Owens. The 1968 Olympics are famous for the Black Power salutes and The Americans refused to attend the Moscow games in 1980.

My friend said she feels that her country is being embarassed by unfair coverage abroad. She reminded me about the campaign to boycott Carrefour, because President Sarkozy of France refuses to attend the Olympic opening ceremony. This is seen as a huge loss of face for China. However, today I spoke to a student whose father is a senior manager for Carrefour in China. Blaming Carrefour for French policy seems similar to holding me responsible for the actions of Gordon Brown. Mr Brown may be the UK’s Prime Minister, but should I punished for his actions? It’s not as if he would ever ask me for advice before making a decision.

Her final point was that the Western world does not understand what is happening in Tibet and China. Anyway, she said it’s an internal matter that has nothing to do with foreigners. She may have a point about this, but I told her that the Dalai Lama is greatly admired in the West and it’s widely believed that Tibet was an independent country that was invaded by China in 1950. That view may be up for debate and I am aware that I do not know enough to give an informed opinion about this issue. I need to read more about Tibetan and Chinese history.

Tibetan culture, religion and politics are murky areas of investigation. I used to be a practicing Buddhist of The New Kadampa Tradition, which comes from the same Gelugpa tradition that is practiced by the Dalai Lama. There is a schism in this school over a worship of a deity called Dorje Shugden, which the Dalai Lama banned in the 1990s after he declared that this religious icon was actually an evil spirit. There were claims at the time that Dorje Shugden practitioners were being persecuted by Dalai Lama devotees. It’s impossible for outsiders to understand and appreciate politicised issues focusing on finer doctrine about whether a mental continuum is an enlightened being or an evil spirit. It’s all very confusing.

I have a good friend from school who is a disciple of the Karmapa, the head of the Kagyu school of Tibetan Buddhism. He used to live at a Tibetan Buddhist monastery in Le Bost, France where he completed a three year meditation retreat. He is now teaching English to Tibetan refugees living in Darjeeling, India. I will ask him for his opinion when I see him, because he is fair and open minded. I have known him for nearly twenty five years.

I am witnessing a strong reaction towards the Tibetan issue. I saw a friend had added an (L) before her contact name on MSN to show her love for China. This is China’s tech meme of the week. I understand that many Chinese are intensely patriotic, but in my country open displays of nationalism will arouse suspicion that you are bigoted. I know Chinese patriotism is not intended to be negative, but I would like to think that we are living in the first truly international century.

Anyway, I was very happy to share views in a candid way with my Chinese friend. To be honest, I have always been shy to bring up this issue in case I cause offence, but she listened with an open mind and understands that Westerners and Chinese have very different views about the media, politics and Tibet. She brought up this topic and it’s great to have a conversation with someone you like, but who looks at the world in a very different way.

Update
I have just read an overview of this issue on the BBC website, which was endorsed by local blogger Wang Jian Shuo who has recently been quite critical about the western media. The article confirms and amplifies many of the ideas I discussed with my Chinese friend.

Link: BBC News

Please note that I don’t want to identify my Chinese friend, because I don’t want to embarrass her or put her in an uncomfortable position.

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