Official arrogance first image Chinese get of Britain
- Source: Global Times
- [21:32 March 11 2010]
- Comments
By James Palmer
Getting Chinese visas in the UK used to be an annoying experience. In Manchester, with the biggest Chinese community in the country, you had to go to a tiny little office in the consulate, a gloomy Victorian building.
It was only open for a couple of hours a day, four days a week, with one beleaguered staff member dealing with a queue of applicants.
The last time I went, it was a very different story. China had just opened a new visa service in London and Manchester, open all day, with friendly staff and quick processing times. Any UK citizen wanting a quick jaunt to Shanghai needs nothing more than their passport and 30 pounds to get a tourist visa.
Chinese applicants for UK visas face a very different picture. Sure, the offices might be shiny, but from the beginning you're treated like a criminal applying for parole.
Ever since the UK public began to panic about immigration, a government ever-eager to pander to populist demands has instituted an absurd crackdown on all visa applications.
Want to go to the UK for a holiday? You better be prepared to fork over every detail of your life. God help you if you forget anything in the first application – any point will be seized upon by visa officers trained, as one British lawyer I spoke to put it, to "treat every applicant as if they were trying to pull a fast one."
Even marriage isn't enough of a guarantee anymore. One UK-born friend of mine, applying for a visa for his Tanzanian wife and two children so they could visit his parents, had it arbitrarily refused by the Dar es Salaam embassy despite his wife and first child having visited the UK with him several times before.
My fiancee's always been fine with visa applications. But that's because she's part of a distinctly privileged class. She's studied abroad before, worked for the BBC, and spent her last trip to London meeting Prince Philip and UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon. For ordinary Chinese, it can be a nightmare.
In China, the British officials often seem to have only the faintest grasp of the realities of Chinese life. One friend of mine was refused because she had a Tianjin hukou (residence permit) and a Beijing job, and basically accused of being a liar over the issue. But the vast majority of Beijing workers, especially recent graduates and migrants, don't have Beijing hukou, something which anyone with the most basic knowledge of the capital knows.
What kind of image does this send to people coming to Britain, I wonder?
That the British are a bunch of power-intoxicated tossers who think you're a dirty, thieving foreigner who'll tell any lie just to get into our little island Eden? It's a profoundly arrogant attitude that leaves prospective visitors sour and embittered even before they arrive at Heathrow.
I'm singling out the UK here, but the US and other developed nations can be just as bad. What makes it worse is that the whole thing is essentially a money-making scheme.
Not only are visa charges increasingly enormous, but a large amount of visas are secured via time-consuming appeal or going through the application process again – which costs extra fees. One suspects that the lack of information in the initial stages is a deliberate attempt to screw more money out of the unsuspecting applicants.
It's natural for a country to take sensible precautions during the admissions process. But the hostile, accusatory attitude of officials and the extortionate fees and demands involved go too far.
