Or, yet another reason why I hate working for Chinese universities...
I went to pick up a wodge of money today from the Chinese university(-based school) that I have been doing most of my business training for over the past couple of months.
My liaison there was "too busy" to e-mail me the breakdown of payments and tax deductions (expected, as a matter of course; and oft requested by me over the past few days) until this afternoon, after I'd taken delivery of the cash from another member of staff (who I didn't know very well, and hadn't actually been involved in running any of the courses I'd taught).
And - surprise, surprise - I found it riddled with errors and omissions.
The applicable tax rate was not stated. (Although I now know it to be de facto 16%; there is, in theory, a tax-free allowance of 800 rmb per month, but this is rapidly eroded by the swingeing 20% tax rate applied to the first tranche of taxable income. A tax rate that swings up from 0% to 20% and then back down to 16%, and then who-knows-where? [it doesn't bother me, since I never earn enough to get up into the next tax bracket] - that is pretty eccentric, even for China!)
The tax was not calculated separately for each of the different courses (although, in practice, the same tax rate applies throughout).
The total of taxable income was not given.
The "traffic allowance" (i.e., travel expenses) was listed alongside the taxable income, even though it's supposed to be tax-exempt - leading to the entirely predictable screw-up that tax was inappropriately deducted from these sums as well.
Ah yes, and one full day of training I'd done near to the mid-month payment cut-off was erroneously omitted altogether. And one of the Presentations classes I've been running on Sundays was recorded as a half-day only, although it was in fact a full day.
So, the payment breakdown is a confusing mish-mash which does little to help me understand how much they are paying me or why. But when I painstakingly wade through it all for 10 minutes or so, I discover that the bastards have underpaid me by a little over 2,000 rmb.
I am NOT happy. No indeed. Not at all.
But neither am I surprised. Nor do I suspect wilful dishonesty. Just about all the Chinese I've ever worked with have been staggeringly innumerate. Not excluding the accountants. In fact, especially the accountants. I have from time to time participated in the grading of the mass recruitment exams the major international accounting firms regularly run in the "leading" universities here: the basic number-awareness of the candidates - even those coming from a science or engineering background - is invariably dismal, far, far worse than their English skills (which are mostly very limited, too; but at least most of them can knock out some kind of sentence occasionally; whereas none of them seem to be able to analyse statistics or complete simple arithmetic).
These reflections can't help but remind me of this classic Chinglish anecdote about the profession of accounting.
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We have a (quasi-racist) line over here which we pull out whenever we're, say, driving a rental car in a city we've never visited -- and do something boneheaded like turn the wrong way on a one-way street, or nearly collide with a pedestrian. It's spoken in a sort of pidgin English, usually muttered (sometimes to someone sitting alongside us): "Please to be sorry," we might say, "please to forgive. I am visitor here. I do not know ways of your country."
Some of these stories of Chinese pay practices and such almost make me think that the Chinese "function" something like the driver of a rental car in the unfamiliar neighborhood of capitalism. The steering is on the wrong side, ditto the headlight, turn-signal, and wiper switches, and all the traffic signs are in an alien language.
But, well, they've just got to get from here to there, don't they? (And never mind the crowds watching, open-mouthed, as the fellow goes up on the curb, backs up narrow alleys, accelerates when just trying to blow the horn, and so on.)
I don't think we can say that capitalism is unfamiliar territory for the Chinese any more. 20 or 30 years ago, perhaps, but not now. And you need to be able to do maths in a planned economy, too.
One of the problems is the fact that this is still essentially a nation of peasants - with at least 60% or 70% of the population getting very little education at all. Perhaps an even greater problem is the legacy of the Cultural Revolution: if you decommission your universities for a decade, it takes at least a generation, maybe two, for your higher education sector to fully recover.
I find there's also a remarkable level of over-dependence on mechanical aids here - originally abacuses, and more recently electronic calculators. Shop clerks and waitresses invariably seem to be incapable of adding 12 to 5 without employing one of these devices.
But the abysmal level of numeracy even among people with a high level of education, even among people majoring in a maths-dependent subject, is quite amazing.
The Chinese ineptitude with figures most often presents itself, in my unfortunate experience, with a complete inability to recognise really glaring errors.
OK, my mental arithmetic is pretty - but hardly in the prodigy class. But gross errors leap off a page at me fairly readily. With the Chinese - even accountants, especially accountants - this NEVER seems to happen.
I can't remember how many exchanges I've had like this one:
"This figure here - it's supposed to be 10% of the sum of these figures?"
"Yes."
"Well then, it's WRONG. It's actually... nearly 15%!"
"HOW CAN YOU TELL???"
Um, 'pretty... good' I meant, obviously.
Darned typos!
Wait, Chinese people bad at maths? Now that is strange. But stereotypes aside, I see what the real problem is; I was just surprised that no-one had mentioned the thing everyone was thinking! I'll get me coat...
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