On the national emblem you’ll see the Tiananmen gate on the background and on the front you find the usual 5 stars. The whole is encircled by ears of grin and a cogwheel is represented at the bottom. The usual Chinese red and gold actually are meant to bring good fortune and happiness.

Tiananmen is there to symbolize the people of china of their fight against imperialism and feudalism, the cogwheel and ears of grain the working class and the stars the unity of the Chinese people under the leadership of the CPC.

The national emblem of the People’s Republic of

Something that always surprises me in is this constant need for supervision. Whatever you ask someone to do you have to make sure they do it, they make them correct then do again until it’s good, there is nothing as such as self management.

A simple example, I was in my new flat the other day waiting for the ADSL guy to come install the wireless and also waiting for the delivery of a table for the living room. The guy for the ADSL comes install the connection in the living room. You have to know that there are plugs everywhere in the house to get internet, so I decide to check whether it works in the other room as well. I take the modem plus it and connect it to my computer: nothing… A bit annoyed I ask the guy “why don’t we get any network connection when using the other plugs?” on that he answered something like “well I didn’t know you wanted to be able to access internet from every room so I did not bother to make the connection” so basically the cables where all in place and all leading to the central but the guy plugged only on of them in the central although it would have only take half a second to connect all of them. As I asked him to do so, e looks at me very annoyed and says with despair “all right, I’ll do it” he goes to the central and come back two minutes after saying: “it’s done” to make sure I want to try (then he looks annoyed and tells me that I can trust him) but anyway I want to try and and off course it doesn’t work. I try to speak with him but off course my limited Chinese and his English at level 0 makes it difficult so I call the landlord and ask him to speak with the guy. The final result: we’ll come back tonight for the wireless so we don’t need to connect all the plugs… All right, that’s good for me anyway it’s not like I bought this flat. He come back at night with a friend to install the wireless, they stayed there for 2 hours but did not manage to make it work… can someone explains me how is that possible? Anyway they decide to come back the day after with a third guy then in two second everything is fixed… The boss was there so things got sorted much faster.

At the mean time they were delivering the table so first they take it out of the cartons and ask me if I have anything to clean it. I bring them the stuff for cleaning then I see that they are trying to clean the glass without taking out all the adhesive tape. I tell them that it’s going to be much easier to clean the table if they just take it off. They “agree” then take on piece off and clean. I then decide to go back to my movie the time they clean everything… 30 minutes later still not ready…weird. So I go and check again and what do I see they’re cleaning again with the adhesive tape. So basically as long as none is there to check them out nothing is being done properly.

Basically in if you want something done the way you want you always have to make sure there is someone that 1) gives clear instruction and who has all the authority 2) check almost everything that is being done, it is so annoying.  Maybe is that the result of the communism of the past year that still influence the way people work.

But don’t worry, I am not saying that all Chinese are incapable people; I am just saying that those with the low level of education tend to lack initiative and efficiency but at the same time we are also in The country where things, such as road construction, can be done at the speed of light.

Yesterday a Chinese colleague was telling me that china sometimes need a dictator, it’s the only way to get things done and was comparing and and explained part of the success over is the communist government.