You guys will love this…. We were on the way to a meeting today and as we went through a check station, the traffic cop flagged us down. The van was reported to have 10 outstanding traffic violations that were past due. After some discussion, we were able to get the location of the violations; they were about 50% from speed cameras on the highway and the rest from cameras at traffic signals. The deal was that all but 1 of them was in LongHua district- a place that this van has literally never entered. The police impounded the van and held us all for a couple of hours by the side of the road.
What we were able to work out was that Lu (driver) went to the station and got the ticket list and had them pull up the photo records of the violations. Fortunately it was a car, not our van, so they agreed that the issue was a stolen tag number. We were then given the opportunity to bail the van out so that we can use it while the record is cleared up. This was a bit over $2,000 and the guy said that we would likely get most of it back within this year. What a neat deal, all part of life’s rich pageant I suppose.
Mainly it just made me mad. This is somewhat par for the course in China, but it is still frustrating. The real jewel here is that I was on a conference call with a new client when we were stopped and I had to end that so in order to stand in front of the driver's side door to prevent Arthur redneck from taking the van without a written receipt with the towing company stamp. If he did this, it would be like us giving the vehicle to them and if he wanted to steal it, he would have a free and clear head start of at least 2, maybe 3 days. It is a frequent occurrence.
We went through a deal last year with this same van where there was a mistake on the tag number vs. VIN / registration. Even thought the traffic control department admitted that it was a mistake, they would not release the van to us for what was said to be at least 6 months to "clear the situation". I paid a bribe of close to $6,000 to get the thing back.
We are not talking Ferrari here- this is a van worth maybe 20 grand in the USA, but costs close to $45,000 here in China and we only have 2 of them.
I have endless stories of frustrations here in China, Malaysia, Vietnam, Cambodia, Phillippines etc... This is the price to be paid for the opportunities that exist for my company. We anticipate the bubble here to last maybe through the Olympics in Beijing (2008). My opinion is that China will have the mother of all economic crashes in a few years. Risk management for us? We owe _RMB 0.00 in China or Hong Kong.
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