Corruption: Lesson 1

A Chinese visa is usually not the most difficult one to get, in Germany at least. In Kyrgyzstan the situation is slightly different.

The organization I work in was invited to attend a conference in Urumchi by a major development bank. The official invitation letter in my hands, signed by the president of this bank, I went to the Chinese consulate to get the visa. Maybe it's worth mentioning that the conference was kind of on a ministerial level, that means: important.
So, I am standing at the counter without expecting anything bad to happen, the girl on the other side of counter takes my passport and my invitation, looks over it and tells me: "No, I can't give you a visa, there's no Chinese signature and no red stamp on your invitation." Of course, in China, all the important documents must have red stamps on it. But an invitation signed by the president of a major development bank, for a conference on ministerial level – you kind of might think that this one should work without a red stamp.

I tried to argue with her that we were a governmental organization and this was a high level meeting and of course there's no Chinese stamp on it because the invitation is from the bank, but if the conference is hosted by the Chinese government, in China, the Chinese wouldn't have anything against having us in. After five minutes non-stop-talking I at least convinced her to talk to the consul, but the consul gave me the visa just as little as the girl. No Chinese red stamp – no visa.
Terrible situation, it was Wednesday, my flight was on Saturday. Fortunately I met Svetlana in the consulate, a woman who managed a tourist/visa agency just next door to the consulate. She told me that she would help me to arrange the visa, even whithin one day. We agreed that I would phone the bank and ask them whether they could send me a Chinese invitation; otherwise I would phone her.

Later this evening I went to the tourist agency, that indeed was in the house next to the Chinese consulate to bring Svetlana my passport, because the bank said that it would take them 3 days to get an official invitation from the ministry. Guess who was sitting in the room next to Svetlana? The same girl from consulate that refused to give me the visa. It was kind of a funny situation, I told her that except Kyrgyzstan only the Chinese consulate in Kasakhstan didn't accept the bank's invitation. She answered that it was not her fault, the consul was new to Bishkek, just finished university, didn't know yhe situation well...

Anyway, two days later I got my visa. The same consul that refused to give me the visa on the basis of an official invitation now gave me the visa on the basis of a tourist invitation, from which she must know that it’s bought from officials in China. She may even have remembered my passport because there are no that many German passports in the Chinese consulate in Kyrgyzstan and even fewer defiant Germans that don’t accept that they don’t get a visa to a country they’ve been already six times to. I paid 30USD more that I would have paid in the consulate.

The Chinese consulate in Bishkek is open 3 days a week, 9-12. From what I saw, the amount of visa issued regularly can’t be more than ten a day. The amount of passports I saw in the tourist-agency was about 60. That means that amount of visas issued irregularly is six times more that the regular ones, with a surplus of 20$ per passport (I had to pay 10$ more because my passport was not Kyrgyz).

Additional Information: The people who work for official organs usually earn 50$ a month. I don’t think it’s different with the local Kyrgyz staff in the Chinese consulate.

So far about corruption. It would be easy to be judgmental but let's face it: Such agencies provide a possibility of traveling to China or to many other countries to which people otherwise wouldn't be able to travel to at all because they happened to have the wrong passport or to live in the wrong country. It doesn't work for countries like Germany or many other EC countries but it does work for many other Asian and Central-Asian courtiers where the visa-regimes are unnecessary complicated. The illegal sector fulfills the existing demand, that can't be regulated on a legal level due to different reasons that are not consistently reasonable.

This considerations led me to the following question:

If agencies like this, that are working on an illegal basis and promote corruption, give people a possibility to do things that should be normal (for ex. getting a short-term visa to a neighboring country) but are not due to certain circumstances, may corruption be something good after all?