Six months...

It really has been six months since my last blog entry – although with two or three months of time spent researching Chinese hospitals, Christmas, New Year, Chinese New Year and my own birthday having been squeezed into those months it doesn't seem like half a year at all.

The bitterly cold weather looks to be easing up a little and Rizhao has enjoyed some relatively mild days of late. The heavy snow which affected large parts of China this winter only paid a flying visit to the coastal area of Shandong and it is unlikely to return as we head into March, April and beyond.

My employer has asked me to extend my contract, by two months to September 2011, for reasons unknown to me. I am more than happy to do so but I was already planning to sign a new contract from July for a further 12 months. One can only assume that he wants his staff requirement for the summer courses covered well in advance but it does generate an unnecessary amount of paperwork regarding visa, flight allowance, pay increase etc. Upon reflection, it does mean that any future six- or 12-month contracts that I sign after that date will always come to an end on the other side of the very busy winter and summer courses – ie. he will not be left in the lurch, at least not by me. Perhaps it's not such a ridiculous idea after all.

I have been looking everywhere for a way to get a prepaid Visa or Mastercard here in China. I thought that I had found a way around the problem via Western Union's prepaid card but it turns out that you cannot simply add funds at any Western Union branch anywhere in the world, which I am sure would not be difficult for them to implement into a straightforward, risk-free product. No, it is designed for UK residents and can be magically topped up in numerous places all over the UK, but in China it is just a pretty piece of plastic.

China does have a card processing network, called Unionpay, and has been slowly building global relationships to enable the use of these cards overseas and online. Unionpay is supposedly supported by PayPal, but I ditched PayPal over a year ago because of its failure to comprehend such an animal as an expat, trying to use an account in a foreign country, and requesting verification for every purchase it thought might be fraudulent. I attempted setting up a China PayPal account a couple of days ago but when I tried to process a Unionpay payment it just failed. I will notify the world of any developments.

If you Google the subject of credit cards for expats in China, you will notice that there are more than a few potential customers for a prepaid card. In fact, one was launched by Bank of China during the Olympic Games, in Beijing, to ease the financial transaction difficulties for foreigners trying to survive in the clutches of the nation's restrictions. And as soon as the games finished, the card was buried, putting a stop to all those RMB escaping in the direction of a non state-controlled entity.

I fear that banking restrictions are here to stay for a few more years on the development ladder before they are removed in favour of competition, convenience and choice.

Still, I have found a proxy which enables me to use Blogger without the need for a credit card, for the time being (Blogger being one of the many government-censored sites), and will try not to leave it quite so long until the next update.

Warmest of regards and thanks for the continued letters, cards, e-mails, messages, tweets etc.