Matts blog

I thought I should write something about my long and almost painful process of transferring my RMB salary in to a GPB account held in the UK. There seems to be a lot of posts on expat forums and newsgroups asking how to achieve this, but very few answers, and I’m the only person I know how has actually achieved this. The first thing to remember is that transferring money is not a problem, the actual electronic transfer works like everywhere else, so take along your bank details, including branch address and find out the IBAN and SWIFT codes for your account, the main difficulty is exchanging RMB to USD/GPB/etc

First of all, allocate a good chunk of time to do the transaction, and prepare well, you will require all of the following documents:

1. Alien Employment Permit
2. Employment Contract
3. Certificate of Salary
4. Certificate of Income Tax Return (Usually one per month)
5. Passport

You’ll need the originals of all of these, and a photocopy as well, I prepared photocopies of all the documents, and photo page and visa pages of my passport, and any page with a red seal from my Alien Employment Permit.

Most of these documents should be readily available from your HR / operations team, and as long as they have the company seal on them all should be OK.

You’ll need to find a reasonable sized branch, my account was held at Bank of China, and I chose to us ethe Guomao branch as they speak reasonable English there. Expect to queue for some time, you’ll probably be one of many at the Fund Transfer or Travellers Cheque counter - I got pointed to this counter from the normal counters.

Once you get to the counter you’ll have to present your paperwork which is checked, particular attention is given to the tax documents, and a calculation of how much can be converted and transfered calculated, I’m not sure what the formula is, but I was OK

Next you’ll have to fill in a number of forms:

• Payment Form For Payment Abroad
  This form details who you are paying, what currency you are paying in to the amount of currency and the reason in the form of a code - mine was 3200 ‘Other Investment’
• Application For Telegraphic Transfers (overseas)
  This details the sender (you) the receiver (maybe you!!) and the bank details, you only have a small box to fit ALL the bank details in to so take care, you will be asked for IBAN, Swift, Sort code, account number and branch address. This sheet also details the RMB amount and the exchange rate (I got 14.37)
  
• A form in Chinese (I’ll translate and put the name here)
  This has your name, phone number, china address, and (i think) the reason for the purchase of foreign currency.

Next a whole load of transaction slips will require signing, and pin numbers entering, this covers the transaction itself and the commission (for me 100RMB).

Once everything is complete the forms and paperwork will be taken away for checking, this may take a while, as the tax payments were recalculated, but once everything is calculated and many, many stamps applied, its all done! Sounds so simple when its written down, but it took me just short of 2 hours to complete.

I’m not sure how long it takes to reach the UK, I’ll update this entry when it arrives.

So after finishing work today, there was only one thing to do….. Have a leaving party, so I knocked up that old classic - Spag Bol and invited my best buddy Sting and his girlfriend Yang around, and Lizzie’s friend Ramona also came. As its -7 or so, we decided the only viable option for drinks was mulled wine and a quick search round the supermarket turned up Cloves and what I think is whole nutmeg. The mulled wine went down a storm!!!! It seems cheap Chinese wine is the vital ingredient

So once everyone was suitably Inebriated I took my chance to ask Yang what my nick name they had chosen for me was, and it turned out it was 蚂蚱 (ma zha) or in English grasshopper, the general consensus was that this is very similar to ‘Matt’ and I have long limbs like a grasshopper, I’m pretty keen on it as a name

Lizzie also received a new name, which was thought to be more fitting to her than her current Chinese name. So Lizzie is now known as 荔枝 (li zhi) and in English that means Lychee or Litchi chinensis Sonn if you prefer a bit of latin, this fruit is native of southern China, which is about the only bit of China Lizzie hasn’t visited, a must of next time obviously.

Right, guess its bed time, no more mulled wine left, and lots of cleaning and banking to do tomorrow.

But hopefully not unemployable, it exactly 6 minutes time I will officially finish work for Cyclades China, and for the second time in 18 months be voluntarily unemployed. I feel happy. Now, wheres that bottle of Bubbly gone???

No matter how much investigation, planning and preparation you do here, when you finally come to implementing the process in invariably goes wrong - today I had to prepare to send my money to the UK, I had a pile of paperwork and thought I was all prepared. Upon arrival at the bank I was told I didn’t have all the paperwork and there was no way I could access my Bank of China Shanghai account in Beijing, my only option was to go to Shanghai. After talking to a couple of collegues I found I should be able to perform a transfer if I was willing to pay a service fee of 1% capped at 50RMB, so returned to the Bank, and queued for an hour, and after a short arguement where I informed the same clerk of this fee he then quickly performed the transfer as requested. It seems you have to know the process back to front and be willing to tell officials about it to get anything done here.

Fingers crossed I should get my required paperwork tomorrow, and can do battle at the bank again to get the money back to the UK, I’ll be glad when its over!

Tomorrow is the day for the box collection of our chinese junk to be shipped to NZ, we seem to be shipping 2 t-chests of rubbish, I’m sure it could all go missing and no loss to us.

Its getting cold here, I think today is the coldest w’ve seen so far, its 8pm and -4, but witha 45Km NW wind its -13C, pretty chilly, and its SO dry, only 14% humidity (the Namib desert is around 5-10% as a comparison!

I had have a little bitch about Beijing capital airport, last night when I arrived from Shanghai, it took over 30 minutes to get from the runway to the terminal, we seemed to taxi around every taxiway available, before parking at the furthest point from the terminal, and had a very slow bus transfer. In fact it took longer between landing and getting to the terminal, than it did in the taxi traveling 30Km to my house.

Yesterday we took a day trip to the Great Wall at Jingshanling and proceded to walk the 10Km to Simatai, not far, you may think, but when you are walking up and down steps its a killer!!! It was a mazing to be out on unrestored sections of wall, with no one around and enjoying the amazing views being on a wall on top of mountain ridges is, interestingly at times the wall itself was only 1-2M high, as the route taken by this section is almost unreachable from either side! Theres photos here

We finally managed to pay our bill, and I just have to write about the system. Firstly you don’t get a bill, the only way the company informs you that you owe money is a recorded message on the phone, all in chinese. You are then meant to know that you can pay at any bank apart from BoC, by filling in a form in chinese - nice and easy. So with the help of our agent we went to the local CCB and waited an hour to get served then finally paid the bill. I think I prefer Shanghai’s system.

So today is the 56th aniversary of the formation of the Peoples Republic of China, so is a very big celebration here in China. We spent the day hanging around Tiananmen Square taking photos, the results of which can be found here. The tag line for this years celebrations is ‘One World One Dream’ the slogan of the 2008 Olympics, and the as you can see from some of the photos, the flower displays had a big sport theme. The square and sourounding area was packed with everyone from Beijing families complete with the spoilt child, through the old country couple that had spent life savings to make it here for the celebrations, a very interesting time. Below are some pictures of the decorations around our apartment.

So I finally have a date fcor my trip to visit Yahoo! in Taipei, so the second week of October, after the national day holidays i’m booked on a plane to hong long and on to taiwan. I’ve not taken the opportunity to stop off in Hong Kong, which is a bit of a shame, but I think its best to wait a while and get my up coming holiday to Guillin out of the way first. Now on to corriander… I just wanted to say its the best ingrediant in the world. My usual Chicken Curry this lunch was somehow even better today by simply adding some, and it was beautiful!! Lastly, at long last we have hot water at home, and I’m looking forward to taking a hot shower! I guess its the little things that make you happy I’m writing this on a very turbulent plane to beijing, with a pilot that seems intent on diving rather than descending, so excuse the bad typing!!