[UA] International UA: China

[Tom McGrenery]

--

On Fri, 1 Jun 2001 06:54:23   
 R. Menzi wrote:
>Returning to the lost topic of the OU in foreign
>places, I think that the feel keeps quite well in
>Shanghai and HK, and somewhat well in Beijing.

Beijing is very hard for an OU, I would say. An expat OU, on the other hand, could be small but thriving.

>Entropomancers are rare: people will look, but
>traditionally, nobody sticks their necks out.  They
>showed up during the Japanese occupation, and then the
>civil war and gained some popularity, but seemed to
>have declined.  (Someone got a major charge by putting
>all of China's historical treasures into one fat, slow
>cargo plane and flying them to Taiwan through a hot
>warzone.)  Those that are around run about in HK and
>out in the far western territories.
>
The national obsession with pool halls and their attendant illegal card games could be an outlet for Entropomancy, but I'm not too sure on that.

>With the planned economy, one can only guess at the
>degree to which some local Plutomancers got involved,
>with rivals in the opening and reform ofthe economy. 
>Still, very in tune with the consentual value of
>post-standard currencies: RMB is not a publicly traded
>currency, and they exchange at a rate that the feel
>like giving.

Points to back up Plutomancy being a good idea:
You can only take out a limited amount of RMB from the country.

If you're Chinese and want a passport you need to convince the PSB you'll come back. The standard way to do this for a standard (one month) passport is to have a thousand US dollars - and it has to be US dollars - in a bank account. If you can put in more than a thousand, the more the better. The implication is that they keep this money until you return. No Chinese person would give me a straight answer on this one. Understandably.


>
>-------
>
>There's more directly UA stuff, but I never planned to
>be here this long, and didn't feel like lugging my
>books out when I first came out here a year ago...
>wow, it's been that long.  As such, my terminology is
>slipping and I don't have the latest releases, so
>you're going to have to bare with me.

Yeah, I've been without UA material for a year. Terrible. 

[snip more good points]

I agree with the whole of this post, pretty much, though I don't know about HK as I've never been there. Likewise, I've less knowledge of Shanghai than Beijing as I live in the capital. 

Well played, sir.

-- Tom McGrenery



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