Toto....

One country, two million systems.

I'm in Beijing. I've been here for two days now, and I keep getting little shocks that remind me just how far Urumqi is from here, in distance and in spirit. Some of the obvious ones are that it's more cosmopolitan, everyone is much more nonchalant about foreigners, and it's just a whole lot bigger.

Today I took a walk down the alley to the local police station to register my residence, a required procedure for foreigners in China. My housemate Kate came with me, and I noted with some surprise that she sauntered out of the house without passport, proof of registration, and assured me I didn't need anything other than my own passport. We walked into the police station around 2pm and made a quick left into a large room, completely empty aside from two officers behind a long counter. One looked up. I approached her and said "I need to register." Without a word she walked over, booted up her computer, and held her hand out for my passport.

I took this opportunity to look around at the stunningly empty police station. One of the main complaints that people from Xinjiang have about Beijing is the crowdedness. "There are just too many people", they all insist. "The subways, the buses, the streets, the stores, no matter when you go anywhere every little inch of space is crammed with people. Everything takes so long. There's always a traffic jam and don't even try to go out on the weekends."

These complaints echoed in my head while surveying the bare halls of this police station on a Saturday afternoon. In Urumqi, you'll be lucky if the guy you need is in the station any afternoon at all, much less a Saturday afternoon. Cramped little cubbyhole offices are stuffed to the brim with anxious people trying to get their household registration, birth, death, marriage certificates sorted out. People spill over into the hallways and try to quietly elbow their way a little further into the room, brows furrowed and tempers on edge. Overworked police officers seem to always be frozen in their chairs in the same stance: elbows on desk, back hunched, hand on forehead, frown on face. One by one, people are turned away with lectures, admonishments, demands to see other documents or more photocopies of the same one. Such-and-such person needs to come down here personally, and do you have proof?

A supposedly simple matter is generally prolonged into a multi-day affair requiring the personal appearance of your landlord, proof of where you've spent all your time in the country so far, multiple copies of your passport and several passport pictures. Once I was fingerprinted (not standard procedure), nearly every time I was lectured very sternly about something, and only once did I manage to take care of it in one visit to the station.

I have friends who got hauled into the police station and detained for several hours over mishandling of their papers (which were all in order, just not in the right place exactly); it's not uncommon for the police to make surprise visits to your home and see who is hanging around (even in the middle of the night), and you can basically assume that security guards in your residential compound are spying on you and reporting back to your district police. If not them, the neighbors. Maybe both.

Here in Beijing, we sat in this empty room being asked questions by the policewoman on duty. Nothing matched up. I told them the address I had been told, which was written slightly differently from what they had on file. I reported back the name of our landlord as it had been told to me, which turned out to be almost completely different from his actual name. I was registering a day late, something that the Urumqi police wouldn't let you get away with without a really good excuse and proof, in triplicate, that your excuse was valid. Then they'd let you off with lots of glares, very serious lectures, and threats of huge fines, and feel very magnanimous about the whole thing.

This woman didn't even ask me why I registered late, why I was renting a house on a tourist visa, or why I had the wrong address and the wrong name. She looked everything up, typed it into her little computer, and handed me my little slip. Voila, I am registered.

I walked home with Kate, dredging up all the stories I could remember about the police descending on courtyards to make sweeps of foreigners, arresting people, intimidating and spying on perfectly legal residents, nightmarish hours spent in stations trying to find just the right level of feigned respectfulness and remorse to appease the one with the official stamp. As I talked, incident after incident came back to me, and I realized the absurdity of it all in the face of this empty police station and not-at-all unfriendly officer who somehow, against all odds, manages to register people without treating them like criminals.

Somehow, it all doesn't seem so bad right now: squishing onto the subways and buses, standing in line at the supermarket a little longer, rubbing elbows at the noodle stands. At least I'm not suspected of unnamed but apparently heinous crimes just for showing up here.