Weird Policies, One by One

This is another day - a typical day in my life in Shanghai. It is raining hard, and I go to the other office and spent the day there.

Let me show me what happened.

Personal Income Declaration

The HR team sent out notice to everyone to claim their personal income. The local tax department has a list of people (with ID number) who should claim tax, and said everyone must claim it before the end of March, otherwise, the fine will be 2,000 RMB to 10,000 RMB.

It also stated that foreign citizens in China don’t need to claim if they can prove that they lived outside China for continuous one month or 90 days in total in the previous year. That may (or may not) be good news for many people. The good news is, someone don’t need to claim and the bad news is, expats may still need to pay the tax.

One Family, One House?

Besides personal tax claim, recently there are many policies coming out. Some sounds strange for me. For example, there is a proposal in the people’s congress to enforce “one family, one house” policy.

The proposed policy restrict that every family in China can only have one house. People will be punished for the second house. The idea is to lower the house price.

This sounds ridiculous for me. It seems people are trying to get back to the planned economy system.

Real Name for Bicycles?

There is another similar proposed policy. The National Public Security Bureau is said to plan to enforce real name registration for bicycles. That means, they want to set up a system for the 1.6 billion people that every people need to provide their real names (national ID) to buy bicycles. The idea behind this is, too many bicycles are stolen. The Public Security Bureau don’t have any good idea, so they think if every bike has a registered owner, and if they find anyone who ride a bike that is not registered under his/her name, it may be a stolen bicycle.

Well. I have no idea about how they can easily create a policy like this. Do they expect everyone to wear national ID with them, or forbid people to lend their bike to others? I suspect the cost to enforce it is higher than bicycle.

Anyway, the good thing is, the voice of different opinion started to be heard, no matter how weired it seems to me.

Fall Over

It was raining, and the floors and stairs are slippy. I fall over one step and hit the steps heavily. It was dangerous, and my back still hurt. Be careful in this big city, especially in rainy day. There are many shining floors that is as slippy as ice in the rain.