Over Spring Festival my parents and I took a “hard sleeper” (硬卧) train for the first time. After all the stories I’d heard I was expecting the worst, especially since it was 春运，the Spring Festival travel season when public transportation gets beyond maxed out. It wasn’t really all that bad, though I can easily imagine how it could be really bad, depending on your fellow passengers. Definitely wouldn’t want to do it with a baby. The hardest thing for us this time was getting tickets in the first place, which required some serious string-pulling by a friend of a friend — I’m afraid to ask how he got them. But if you like to chat/practice Chinese, and you bring snacks (that you can share), a book, a cup and some instant coffee, a hard sleeper doesn’t have to be a brutal experience, at least going from our recent first trip.

I put a bunch of photos into a gallery, along with details about our ride in the captions. If a hard sleeper train ride is in your near or potential future, the photo gallery will give you a good idea of what to expect, snogging couples and all. Haha, poor mom!

Click a photo to go to the hard sleeper gallery.

An interesting post titled “Are you or your Chinese friends 小资 (xiaozi)?” explores the current China-specific meanings of 小资 (xiǎozī), a shortened form of 小资产阶级 (xiǎo zīchǎnjiējí) (“petty bourgeoisie”). No longer an entirely negative term, this is a nation where people increasingly and unapologetically embrace their inner yuppie:

…today’s xiaozi are not defined about how they make money, but how the spend it. The term, once used to mark those on the wrong side of the revolution, has now been co-opted by popular culture to mean something entirely different and not entirely negative.

(I told you so!)

If you have a infant in China and you’re using baby formula, then this is for you.

The Problem

After the 2008 melamine milk powder scandal, in which several infants died and hundreds of thousands were harmed by drinking melamine-tainted baby formula, we heard other foreigners multiple times say, “Now’s the best time buy Chinese milk powder — it’s never been safer.” Thankfully, we knew better.

That kind of thinking is what Chinese people call “using foreign thinking to understand China” — in other words: wrong. Now in 2010 it’s all over the news that 170 tons of unsafe milk powder products that were supposed to be destroyed in the wake of the 2008 scandal were simply repackaged and put back on store shelves. Melamine is an industrial chemical used in plastics and adhesives that also creates false, boosted protein readings on quality tests of watered-down milk powder solutions so that they don’t appear diluted. It also causes kidney stones and kidney failure. Despite the very public scandal, people knowingly repackaged and resold a product that they knew was lethal. Silly foreigners; “you laowais can’t understand China.”

It’s not a matter of being overly cynical about the priorities of China’s highest leaders. The system is broken, or rather, it was never designed to protect and empower individuals and the public in the first place (just the opposite; it was designed to empower the rulers at the expense of the people). Even if high-level leaders have good intentions they simply can’t adequately enforce these kinds of policies. In response to a major international scandal in which babies died, hundreds of thousands were harmed and the public was outraged, they executed a dairy farmer and a salesman, shuffled the responsible gov. officials around, and obviously failed to remove 170 tons of the stuff that caused the damage in the first place. (Those ‘disgraced’ officials are now back in same-level or higher positions.)

It borders on irresponsible, in my opinion, to trust the Chinese system more than you have to. Thankfully, when it comes to baby formula, trusting the system is unnecessary.

Breast milk is best, of course, but if you live in China and your baby needs formula, 怎么办？

Our Solution

When we need baby formula, we use Táobǎo to get imported name-brand Dutch formula (inspected by our Dutch friends) for the same price or cheaper than what’s on the store shelves in China. No doubt it includes ingredients made in China, but Dutch babies haven’t gotten kidney stones from baby formula yet.

Taobao.com is the cuter, blinkier, Chinese eBay. Some of your Chinese friends or co-workers most likely have accounts. My Chinese co-workers used to shop on Táobǎo all day before the company blocked the site. Get someone to order imported formula for you or open your own account (opening an account requires Chinese and Táobǎo accounts can be complicated, even for locals).

*Special tip: The first time you order from a vendor on Taobao.com, order a small amount so you can check the product closely to see if anything looks suspicious. You can get fake stuff on Taobao just as easily as anywhere else. If it checks out, you’re good to go! The vendor we use is here.

**Warning: This is not foolproof! By ordering off Táobǎo you’re trusting your ability to spot a fake product. Some fakes can be very well done. Be extremely careful. Ordering imported formula from Taobao is no guarantee, it’s just significantly better odds than domestic formula, imo. For a safer and only slightly more expensive option, see the first and fifth comments below.

If anyone has any other baby-formula-in-China advice, please let us know in the comments!

(This is the first in a series; several more are cued up, in no particular order. We have a baby, so as we discover the tricks of the trade in China, we’ll share them here.)

Related:

• A Foreign Baby in Tianjin Pt. 1 – is this our future?

Other foreign baby in China essentials:

• Foreign baby in China essentials: FRIENDLY STRANGER FINGER SHIELD
• Foreign baby in China essentials: FACEBOOK SUBSTITUTE (or VPN) & SKYPE
• Foreign baby in China essentials: AIR PURIFIER

See the trailer for a new, critically acclaimed documentary showing the life of Chinese migrant workers and the connection between them and you. Outside China you can visit the official website.

The public service announcements I grew up with said stuff like wear your bike helmet, don’t do drugs, smoking is bad, etc. But here’s a Chinese one that’s trying to get people to stop offering “red packets” full of money (红包) to teachers, doctors, policemen, and gov. officials. In China if you want to have any confidence that these people will actually do their jobs, a hóngbāo or two (or more) is sometimes necessary.

I’m not kidding; that’s exactly what these signs say:

Currently in the Chinese media, and now all over the English China blog world, is the news that China is considering passing a law that would make it illegal to eat dogs and cats. But even if it passes, I have my doubts that those hypocritical pork-eating bourgeois specie-ists will succeed in enforcing their shameless attack on cultural practices that go back thousands of years.

The image on the right is a bag of dog meat one of our Chinese teachers gave us as a gift.

Anyway, I just couldn’t pass up sharing a photo of a sign that says “Cats are friends, not food!” （猫是朋友，不是食物）。 Also visible in the photo:

• “Refuse to eat cats.” （拒绝吃猫）
• “Please show humanitarianism, set them free.” （请发扬人道主义 放过它们）
• “Cherish humanity’s good friends! Refuse to eat cat and dog meat.” （爱护人类好友！拒绝吃猫狗肉）
• “Refuse to eat cat and dog meat. Cherish humanity’s friends.” (拒食猫狗肉 爱护人类之友)
• 请口下留情 is a play on the phrase 手下留情 (“restrain your hand”), as in showing mercy or sparing someone’s feelings by not meting out more punishment than is needed, often in the context of criticizing. On the sign they switched “hand” (手) for “mouth” （口）, so it might mean something like, “Be merciful; please restrain your mouth”.

For our personal encounters with cats and dogs as food in China, including a downloadable translated menu from a local dog meat restaurant, see here:

• Dead puppies (don’t look, Grandma!) – menu included
• Obligatory cat eating post
• 龙虎斗

This is a dog meat restaurant near our old apartment:

The last time we ate dog, at a Korean restaurant with one of our teachers and her Korean fiancé:

Honestly, it tasted better at the dump-of-a-restaurant two photos up, but it wasn’t great at either place. Not like some of the donkey I’ve had.

Last night, 7:23, according to the monitoring equipment installed in the U.S. embassy in Beijing:

What “500″ means:

150+ = “Unhealthy”, 200+ = “Very Unhealthy”, 300+ = “Hazardous”. So what are we supposed to call it when it maxes out the scale?

Of course, you might be wondering what the Ministry of Environmental Protection was reporting at the same time:

The Chinese version site had the same:

As we couldn’t see down the street today, I don’t wonder who’s numbers are more accurate. However, three things you need to know about comparing pollution numbers:

1. Part of the reason for the discrepancy is that China doesn’t monitor the smaller, more harmful forms of air pollution.
2. It also helps that they shifted the location of their monitoring equipment to get better averages and record more “blue sky days”.
3. Measurement scales vary from country to country. You can see how China’s pollution scale compares to those of Honk Kong and the U.S. here: API and PM10 – health and here: Using the Beijing Air Quality Index (AQI) – Part I. These are also helpful (Wikipedia): Air Quality Index and Air Pollution Index. This site has a convenient widget that lets you compare China’s interpretation of its current pollution levels with that of other countries.

On days like this you can smell it as soon as you open the front door and see it just by looking across the street.

We first found these sites via MyHealth Beijing. Click the screen shots to view the source pages. See the links below for some pollution photos.

Related:

• Behold the power of China’s weather gods!
• Everything you wish you didn’t know about air pollution in China

Pronounced: luǒ hūn
Literally: “naked marriage”
Means: Getting married without first owning a house and a car. For China’s emerging urban middle classrelatively privileged urbanites, this is a big deal. (See CCTV’s People have mixed attitudes to “naked” marriage).

Translated from Chinese here:
“China’s fundamental condition is precisely represented by the clash between patriarchy and modernity in different organizations, and the extensive infiltration of unofficial institutions into the official ones. Patriarchy provided a credit mechanism without expensive and complicated contractual procedures, and thus hindered the establishment of such a legal contract system. It is certain that until a healthy legal system, social security, and basic administration systems are well established, this kind of unofficial organizational mechanism will continue to exist like a phantom. The current modernization process in China will inevitably have to constructively integrate “pre-modernity,” which might lead to a more localized and more culturally contextual Confucian modernity.”

Samplings of translated Chinese internet reactions to the new movie Avatar, which is so popular in China that people are lining up for hours to buy tickets and companies are treating their staff as a perk, reveal that Mainlanders see a modern day parable directly applicable to their own society. It’s being called a “nail house parable“: “For audiences from other places, barbaric eviction is something they simply can’t imagine–it’s the sort of thing that could only happen in outer space and China.”