A few days ago I wasn’t in the mood for Chinese and didn’t
have much battery left on the ebike to take me far to get anything good. So after work I wanted to go somewhere on the
way home where I could get some non-Chinese food. Luckily there was a new restaurant that had
just opened on the road home so my wife and I decided to go there. It was a massive fancy new building and I had
always found it surprising how they had decided to build such a luxurious
restaurant in a not so great location, and unsurprisingly I had never seen it
getting much business. I also knew that
the food was not going to be anything great but I wanted to check it out.
I have been in Xuzhou over 2 years now and seen many places
like this come and go, they open for a while, look pretty and serve a few
customers and then as expected, shut down after a year or so. So I always found it strange, why do places
like this keep popping up, if they all seemed doomed to failure. And why are they all doing the same thing, a
nice environment with bad food. Surely
they would learn from their mistakes.
The photo here is of a tea house that opened near where I
work. This was a really fancy place,
apparently they had spend the equivalent of a million pounds on the entrance
alone. With a massive screen that light
up the little square at night with nonsensical videos and advertisements, and
very funnily sometimes the BSOD (blue screen of death). This place had a massive grand opening,
looked amazing and was a very large place so must have had substantial
investment. I heard rumours that it was
a very important person in Xuzhou ’s
son, and there were also rumours that it was a secret high end brothel. Anyway after the opening nothing really
happened there, you could see all the staff cleaning and standing by the doors
waiting for the customers, who never came, and I mean never, I never saw one
person who wasn’t dressed in uniform walk in or out of that place. And considering this was the building next to
the one I work at I was going there nearly everyday, and also the gym I used to
go to was behind the tea house and to get there I had to walk past the kitchen,
which had a glass wall so you could look in and I never saw any of the chefs
doing any cooking, or anything apart from standing around and then cleaning if
it was late.
So I was always perplexed at how this amazing place could do
so poorly, especially as it may have been a certain person’s son’s place. Surely he had the connections to make a place
like that a success, a perfect place for business meetings which hundreds of
people could easily be directed to. But
for some reason they weren’t. And
unexpectedly after a year or so the place shut it’s massive beautiful
doors. And I never got to try the tea there
(which was apparently at least £50 a pot).
So during dinner I brought up the subject of these mystery
business ventures with my wife and unexpectedly she came up with the answer,
which hadn’t occurred to me at all. What
she said was that they are massive money laundering scams, someone takes a
bribe, then opens a fancy restaurant, and then launders the money through the
restaurants earnings until all the money is clean, and then shut the place
down.
It seems to make sense, everyone knows that there are
massive levels of corruption here, and bribes are being passed out in the
$billions. But with the change of government
leaders there has also been a massive crackdown on corruption. Seen recently with the death of a party
employee during interrogation (torture) shanggui extra legal corruption
investigations, and also with the Bo Xilai case. I also head another rumour (many rumours
flying around Xuzhou
these days) that the certain so and so who’s son opened the tea house did a
runner. This has actually happened quite
a lot all over China
with the leadership change and corruption crackdown. Many officials have stepped down from their
jobs to save themselves from being found out.
So maybe these short term restaurants and fancy tea houses
will soon be a thing of the past. But I
bet there will still be a few more opening up in good old Xuzhou over the next few years. China may be changing ridiculously
fast, but old habits die hard, especially when money is concerned.
