Written by a Chinese friend whom i met on my travels many moons ago. It’s about Beijing’s subways where the exits and entrances are manned by surly officers and overshadowed by x-ray machines.
A while later, another friend was stopped for having “dangerous” deodorant in his bag. The machine roared and he was forced to show it to the angry faces of the officers on duty. He told me that on his return journey, he simply carried it in his coat while the guards chatted with each other.
While it made sense during the Olympics when nutcases (drunk, simply insane, or merely fundamentalist) had to identified and stopped, now it has lost its meaning – like bureaucracy.
As I write this, there’s a niggling at the back of my head that asks “one-and-done like the Bird’s Nest?”
At least Beijing’s National Stadium is making money from the “daily intake of 20,000 to 30,000 people who pay RMB 50” to wander around the immense empty stadium that’s supposed to hold 80,000 people.
But what are they going to do with 260 x-ray machines? Send it to hospitals?
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