What makes being in a new country fun is learning your way around all the thousands of idiosyncrasies that color daily life. And few things are more idiosyncratic than the Chinese banking system.

 

I thought I’d hit the limits of self-defeating stupidity when I opened my first bank account in Singapore, but, just as Singapore was only a mild taste of the craziness that is the rest of Asia, Singapore’s modern banks gave only a hint of the frustrations waiting in Beijing.

 

Never mind, of course, that the major Chinese banks are all insolvent and that the Chinese government offers no depositor insurance that I am aware of. Depreciating US dollars held in a Bank of China account rank alongside Iraqi government bonds as an investment strategy. Of course no one you know would be dumb enough to do such a thing. Ahem.

 

Once I had been offered my job in Beijing I took the advice of the finance team at my new company and went to the Bank of China branch in the basement of the China World Trade Center to open an account. Here I encountered the first big difference with Singapore. A foreigner in Singapore needs a phenomenal amount of identity, residency and employment documentation to open a bank account, but he can legally and anonymously change money on the street in moments. In China, any fool with a passport and one yuan (12 US cents) can open a passbook savings account in ten minutes, but changing money requires your passport, signatures on two separate receipts, branch manager approval and a series of impressive, red chops of near imperial stature.

 

In most basic ways, the Chinese banking system functions perfectly adequately. Your money is there when you need it, the ATMs are serviceable and the tellers are generally congenial. But I have tested the system’s limits twice in ways that would worry me if I was a private company with all my accounts and cash held therein.

 

Like most accounts in China, the land where personal credit and checks are dangerous, new ideas, mine is a passbook account. It is, in fact, the first passbook account I have had since I was fifteen. When I opened my account I was given an ATM card and my passbook, and asked to create PINs for both. Since I rarely use my passbook, I duly forgot the PIN. But without the PIN I couldn’t update my passbook with transaction records, so I couldn’t reconcile my books. This bothered me more than you might think, so I eventually went to the bank to request a new PIN for my passbook. I brought my passport and ATM card, which I thought would be sufficient to prove my identity.

 

At the bank I explained my problem to the teller. She explained that she could issue me a new password, but that she would need to freeze my account for a week for security reasons. Well, I said, that wouldn’t do. I couldn’t go without access to my money for a week. Fortunately, Bank of China was ready with two convenient options. If the freeze would be a problem, I could either close my account and move all the money into a new one with a new passbook which I could immediately use, or simply withdraw whatever I needed to get me through the week while my account was frozen. Nice to know my money was being so well looked after.

 

When Olivia arrived we thought it would be good for her to have her own ATM card as well. The Ozzie & Harriet thing, where she asks me for cash periodically, doesn’t really work for us. So we went back to Bank of China and asked if they could issue another ATM card on my account. Nope. One account, one name, one card. Tough luck.

 

OK, well, do they have joint accounts where we could have two names? Nope. One account, one name, one card. Tough luck again. But the branch representative did propose a solution. Olivia should open her own account, he suggested, and then we could use the ATM to move money from my account to her account whenever we needed.

 

Well, that sounded like a perfectly good idea, so we opened Olivia her own bank account with 10 yuan, and then we went straight to the ATM in the branch to try a transfer. I carefully went through the process, using the ATM to request a transfer of 1000 yuan to her account. The transaction failed, and out popped a receipt that said, “Consult your branch”. So I went back to the branch representative and said, “We tried to use the ATM to move money to my wife’s account, but the transaction failed.”

 

“Yes,” he replied, calmly. “That normally doesn’t work.”