Fake Documents

Kids playing outside at a kindergarten in China. Image source.

So, my son recently started kindergarten. In China, kindergarten (幼儿园) is 3 years long, and it starts at age 3. When I was a kid in the US, I had 2 years of preschool (starting at age 3) and then 1 year of kindergarten (age 5), but in China this is combined together and called "kindergarten." The public school system in China starts with kindergarten at age 3 (though as far as I know, kindergarten in not compulsory; compulsory education in China starts at age 6). (Whereas in the US, the public school system starts at age 5, and preschool is kind of optional.)

Anyway, getting him registered for kindergarten was A Whole Thing. In China, the bureaucracy is ridiculous, and also parents are very competitive about getting their kid into "a good school." The one-child policy contributed A LOT to this competitiveness, because if you only have 1 kid, you have to really really really make sure you do everything you possibly can so that kid is successful. Parents spend a lot of money sending their kid to all kinds of extra tutoring and extracurricular activities, and kids don't have any time to just play and have a childhood. (That's my opinion...)

So anyway, we are in Shanghai. Shanghai has a bunch of different districts, with varying levels of how hard it is to get your kid into a public school. In some districts, parents were told not to even bother applying if you're not a Chinese citizen and you don't own your home, because you'll be so far down the list that you definitely won't be able to get into a public kindergarten. (Have to do private instead.) But where we live, there are (comparatively) less people, so we didn't have to deal with any restrictions like that.

Because, yeah, there's a whole hierarchy. A whole priority order of which kids get into public school. It goes something like this:

1. Kid has a Shanghai hukou for the district the school is in
2. Kid has a Shanghai hukou, but the address on the hukou is a different district (for example, if you own property elsewhere in Shanghai, and your hukou address is registered there, but that's not where you actually live or where you want to send your kid to school)
3. Kid has a hukou from somewhere else in China (not Shanghai)
4. Kid is from another country or Hong Kong/ Taiwan/ Macau

Basically it's like that. I didn't check that the details are exactly right, so don't take it as literally true, but this is the basic idea. There's a hierarchy, based on your hukou, and people with a Shanghai hukou have more rights to get into Shanghai's public schools. Also I think whether you own an apartment in Shanghai is a factor in this hierarchy.

Ah, now I have to explain what a hukou (户口) is: It's an official document that all Chinese citizens are supposed to have, which lists the names of all the members of your household, and your address. Ie, this document says what city you are "officially" a resident of. In Shanghai, tons of people come from other cities to work, and their hukou is still registered in their home city. (Apparently if you meet certain requirements- like you work for a certain number of years, pay taxes in Shanghai, have a high enough salary- you can transfer your hukou to Shanghai.) Anyway, for accessing public services like medical care and the public school system, people with a Shanghai hukou have more rights than people without.

Anyway, yeah, this is a problem in China, the inequality between big cities vs small cities vs countryside. But people say the hukou system is "necessary" because the population is so high, so you have to put limits on who can access public services. Or something. 

(And I've heard that in the countryside, some families had multiple kids even though they were under the one-child policy. [Note that the one-child policy ended in 2016 and now China is trying to encourage people to have more kids.] The kids who were born after the first kid weren't able to get a hukou or ID card or documents like that. Which is a huge problem.)

ANYWAY, my kid has US citizenship and a US passport, and also has Chinese citizenship, but doesn't have a hukou because... okay it's so complicated and if I explain the whole thing, I'll never get to the actual point of this blog post. Bureaucracy! China doesn't recognize dual citizenship, but the reality is that my kid has both Chinese and US citizenship, so what does that mean? It means more bureaucracy!

So that was a big problem, trying to figure out what category Square Root would fit into when applying for kindergarten, and which documents he needed to submit. Because for each of the categories in my list above, there's a set of documents that you're supposed to bring, and he doesn't have the complete set for *any* of the categories. International kids are supposed to submit their foreign passport, and their Chinese visa which is in that passport. Well, Square Root has a US passport but he doesn't have a Chinese visa because he's a Chinese citizen so he doesn't need one (and China won't issue him a visa anyway because he's a citizen). 

So we called various officials from the school, education department, and immigration office, to ask them how to handle this situation, and they don't know. Like, isn't it their job to know? Seems like it would be! But nope, they are all totally confused by the existence of a half-Chinese kid. 

Eventually we came up with a set of documents that was acceptable, to register him under the "international" classification. So, thank goodness, but wow that was really stressful.

But then there was a second problem, which is what I actually want to blog about there. I titled this post "Fake Documents"; this second problem is where the fake documents come into play.

See, our second problem was this: You need to have some document proving you live at the address that corresponds to the school you are applying for. There is a public kindergarten right across the street from our apartment complex, and we really wanted him to go to that one, because it's right there. So convenient! Anyway, each public school has a specific geographical area assigned to it (this is called 对口 in Chinese). Our apartment complex is in the designated area for this public school. So far so good, right?

For some reason, I thought that since we live here, we would have no issue fulfilling the "we live here" requirement. I don't know why I thought that; that's a real rookie mistake. In China, it's often much more complicated than that. Turns out that, to prove that you live there, you need to either have a property ownership document (if you own the home) or you need some "rental agreement" document issued by some certain government office.

Now, silly me, I thought that since we signed a contract to rent this apartment, that contract would be the document we would use to prove we live here. LOLOLOL! Nope! It's more complicated than that!

No, you have to go with your landlord down to some certain government office, and they will issue you a document that says you and your kid live at this address.

(Note: The landlord owns 1 individual apartment, not the whole building. I was confused about this when I first came to China.)

So, my husband contacted our landlord to say we need him to come and bring his ID card and property ownership document, and do this for us.

The landlord says he "can't."

And there was some back-and-forth between my husband, the landlord, the apartment agent, and the government office that issues these documents. Trying to work through the reasons why the landlord supposedly "can't" and make it work somehow.

Because, in China, a lot of times when people say they "can't" do something that you need them to do for you, it actually means "they can, but they don't want to, but if you inconvenience them enough about it, then they will do it." (Reminds me of the parable of the persistent widow.)

Eventually it came down to this: If the government office issues this document, they will not issue another one for the same address for the next 5 years. This (supposedly) is to prevent property owners from letting all of their relatives and friends pretend to live at their address, just to get into a good school. So the landlord felt like, what if in the future, he has a grandchild who is going to live in this apartment and go to public school? (I don't even know if he has a grandchild or not.) So that's the reason that he refused in the end.

So... then what? If you don't have this document, then you just can't go to public school. Do we have to move...? My husband and I spent a little bit of time searching for legal avenues that we could use to force the landlord to do this for us. (Some of the moms in the WeChat groups suggested threatening to report your landlord for tax evasion- because it's common that landlords aren't paying taxes on the rental income, even though they're supposed to.) But we couldn't come up with anything workable.

At this point, you should be thinking "wow this system is really broken." Yes! You're right!

So anyway. Then the apartment agent said he found a different landlord who owns an apartment in our complex. This landlord is willing to go with us to the government office and pretend we are renting his apartment. For a fee, of course! The fee that this landlord was asking was less than the price of 1 month of private school. 

So that's what we did. We got this document with a fake address on it (still in our same apartment complex though) and used that to register Square Root for kindergarten. And it worked, now he attends the public kindergarten across the street, and it's going well.

So what I actually want to blog about is the ethical questions about this.

When my husband and I were discussing whether to use a fake address, my concerns were these:

1. Are we going to get in trouble?
2. Are we going to have to use this fake address on other documents, and it's going to be a pain trying to keep track of which documents have our real address and which ones have our fake address, and will lead to further bureaucracy headaches in the future?

I wasn't like "no, this is out of the question because it's unethical to bribe a landlord and submit a document that claims we live at an address that's not our real address." I wasn't concerned about the ethics of it, because I could see how broken the system was. A system that broken is not the arbiter of right and wrong.

Maybe in Shanghai, if you rent your home rather than owning it, you just don't have rights to send your kid to public school. You don't have that right, you can only send your kid to public school if your landlord deigns to allow it. Is that the way it's supposed to work?

(My favorite quote from my husband during this process was "I have paid taxes in Shanghai for 10 years, and my landlord decides whether I can send my kid to public school?")

Sometimes I almost say we "had to" get this fake document, but the reality is we didn't "have to." We could have said, "oh, okay, our landlord has decided that Square Root can't go to public school, and that's just the way it is" and then either moved to a different apartment with a different landlord, or paid tons of money for private school and spent a lot of time every day dropping him off and picking him up from the private school (which is not across the street from our apartment).

So, you see we didn't "have to", but we were very very strongly incentivized to do it. And I've heard of a lot of situations in China where, because the bureaucracy is so huge and ridiculous, people are strongly incentivized to lie to the bureaucracy, like we did. Not because people are trying to cheat and steal or whatever, but because we are just trying to live our normal lives and do completely reasonable things, but the system is heartless and nonsensical, and we feel we deserve better than however things happen to shake out when we follow the rules.

My husband told me this isn't a China thing, this is a "this is what the real world is like" thing. I don't know; I have spent almost all my adult life in China, so there are often things I never was aware of before, which feel to me like "this is how it is in China" but perhaps are actually "this is what being an adult is like."

It's an example of privilege, though. If you're able to live your life and you never get into a situation where you need to lie to a giant heartless bureaucracy, just to get the same rights that everyone else has- that's an indication that you are relatively privileged.

What's interesting to me, though, is that it seemed like nobody actually cared if the address on our document is indeed the actual address of the apartment we are actually renting and living in. The teacher at the school who was helping us seemed to have an approach like "as long as you come up with some configuration of documents that the system will accept, you're good"- like, not caring if those documents were true, just that we had the documents. And also, at another step in the process we needed to get a different document from our apartment management, and my husband told them "we live in building X, but we are using an address in building Y for this, see, we have a contract in building Y" (which was the fake contract from our fake landlord), and the apartment management just totally did not care at all. They asked 0 questions about "why are you using this address if you actually live in building X?" All that mattered was that their policy says they can issue this document that we need if we show we have an apartment contract, and so, that's what they did.

And my husband told some friends about this whole thing, and when he got to part about "the fee that the fake landlord was asking for was less than the price of 1 month of private school" they were like "oh that's great!" like so happy to hear how well this worked out for us. Nobody was like "uh isn't this a little shady?" Like it's just a funny story and thank goodness it all worked out in the end, and there's no, like... ethical questions about it...?

It seems to me like, in China, the bureaucracy is so extensive, and so focused on little tiny details that have to be exactly right or else they can't accept the documents you submit, that everyone has run into absurd problems with it. (Which is one of the reasons I'm glad I didn't change my last name when I got married- can you imagine always having to explain that to random government employees? "Yes my name is different than on my old passport/ diploma/ etc but I am the same person" NOPE their system does not have an option for that [though I've heard you can get your consulate to issue a document officially stating that you are the same person- perhaps that will work].)  Everyone has been in that situation where you just don't have the right fapiao (which is a specific type of receipt you need if you're going to get reimbursed for something) so you're just out of luck. And therefore there's sort of this awareness that these bureaucracy rules are not the definition of "right" and "wrong." Instead, you do what you have to do to make it work for you. 

My view is more like, these systems are set up to benefit society as a whole, and it's not good when people decide "the rules shouldn't apply to me because [reasons]." But here in China, when you see enough little nitpicky bureaucracy headaches, perhaps it's not possible to believe that those rules "benefit society." And yes, I am sort of saying "the rules shouldn't apply to us because we really do live in this apartment complex and we really should have the right to send our kid to the public school across the street, it's just that our landlord is being a jerk- and the fake address is in the same apartment complex as our real address so what difference does it make?" I realize I am "making an excuse", and you don't have to agree that it's ethical to do what we did.

But, I want to tell you, there's more to it than just "well you shouldn't use a fake document, that's just completely out of the question, because it's unethical." It's not right to view the situation in such simplistic terms. If you view it that way, you're saying that this system has the power to define what's ethical and what's not. This system, which allows landlords to refuse to let renters use their address to get into public school. Really? That system? That's the one you need to obey in order to be "ethical"? 

Back when I was evangelical and "on fire for God", I definitely believed lying was a sin. (Though conveniently omitting certain facts- in order to give the impression that something false is true- I thought was okay depending on the situation. Because it doesn't technically fit the definition of lying.) I thought if I was in a situation where it seemed like the best option was to lie, that would be an example of "temptation." And, the bible says, "No temptation has seized you except that which is common to man. And God is faithful; he will not let you be tempted beyond what you can bear. But when you are tempted, he will also provide a way out, so you can stand up under it." So, because lying would be a sin, I needed to "trust God" and not lie, even though everything about the practical reality of the situation screamed that it was a bad idea. Somehow, God would work things out.

I don't believe that any more. I mean, just to name 1 example, we have a God who allowed millions of people to die of covid. You really think a God as hands-off as that is going around carefully making sure that no one is harmed by their naive conviction that "lying is a sin, regardless of the situation"?

So. Yeah. We registered our kid for kindergarten using a document that had a fake address on it, because our landlord refused to give us a document with our real address. I won't say that we "had to", because we did have other options: move, or send our kid to a private school which would be way more expensive and far from our home. I think it's okay that we did this, even though it's lying- because the system is set up with so many layers of bureaucracy, which often trips up people who really are trying to follow the rules and do the right thing.

And, you don't have to agree with me, but at least I want you to know that you can't view it like it's as simple as "lying is wrong, and that's that." You have to recognize that there exist systems and societal structures which are so broken that sometimes the right thing to do is to lie to them.

---

Related:

Shadrach, Meshach, Abednego, and Me

Perfect Number Watches VeggieTales "The Ballad of Little Joe" (2003)