Heating in China

They've turned on the heat in Dalian. Actually, in most of China. It's all scheduled by government decree: if you're north of the government-defined Mason-Dixon Line of China, you get heat on such-and-such date, and it gets turned off on such-and-such date. South of that line, there’s no heating. By common assent, the coldest you’ll ever feel is living in an apartment on the wrong side of the heating-line of China.

In the old days, the heat was provided by the government, but nowadays it's from a company (probably government-owned or government-sponsored). You pay the equivalent of about $250 by a date-certain, and you get radiator heat throughout the government-defined winter. If it's cold before or after the pre-defined dates, tough noogies. If it's warm before or after the pre-defined dates, open your windows. If you don't pay by that date-certain, you don't get heat. Just like Obamacare, if you don't enroll in time, you pay the penalty: in this case, a long, COLD winter.

We paid, of course, and our radiator is nice and warm. But it was making a lot of noise the other day, so Ma Lei opened an escape valve to let some air out. The water that squirted out with it went into a little watering jug, but got quickly poured down the drain. I figured we should use it to water the plants, or give it to the dogs, but she'd already disposed of it before I even had a chance to ask. "It's not safe," she said. I sort of shook my head at that. What do you mean it's not safe?

Ma Lei told me that the residents of her former apartment used to collect water from their radiators to wash their clothes, in order to save a few pennies on their water bill. With the whole building doing so, the company that was responsible for steam heating was losing money, so they started putting antifreeze into the radiator water. The first few people who didn't recognize what they were washing with, ruined their entire wash loads. I hope no one gave it to their dogs to drink.

In other heat-related news, Ma Lei's Little Brother told her that the guy at the head of the company supplying heat for the apartment complex just behind where Little Brother lives, absconded with all the money the residents had paid for their heating. By my back-of-the-envelope calculations, that's probably about $150K, perhaps a bit more. Once the money’s been paid and stolen, that’s it: they’re all going to be freezing this winter. And for what?

If the guy managed to escape down one of the tropical wormholes south of here, he could live on that for a while. But really, it's not much of an annuity for the entire rest of one's life. And if he doesn't manage to escape the country, he's going to find it was a very bad bargain. And also, he can never return to China. 

The Chinese government isn't very efficient, but it has a long memory. The papers are full of stories of people who absconded after committing crimes, then 25 years later they returned for what they thought was a brief visit — perhaps a parent's funeral — only to find themselves quickly clapped in irons upon their arrival.

Maybe the guy had already been collecting illicit money for a while, and he just needed $150K to top off his retirement fund. But seriously, I can't believe it was worth it.

Nevertheless, the people in the apartment building are well and truly scrod. In China, if your money didn't get to the proper authorities, it's not going to be the authorities who lose out. Get yourself a lawyer, try to raise a court case, protest all the way up to Beijing, and all you'll earn for yourself is an illegal detention for being a troublemaker.