Daily Archives: 18 July, 2008

On Mailing Drugs to China

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Of interest to expats and Olympic visitors …

Over dinner this evening I heard the unfortunate tale of an 6 month American expat who had been receiving regular, monthly, mailed deliveries of a specific prescription drug from the United States. The packages were sent using the US Postal Service’s Global Express, with accurate shipping manifests. And they were delivered on-time, without any problem, to an address in Beijing.

That is, until two weeks ago, when the person scheduled to receive the drugs was asked to visit the central China Post offices with paperwork showing that s/he was authorized to receive the pharmaceutical. As it happened, s/he had a copy of the US prescription, but when she arrived, she was told that – due to new security regulations – her doctor would need to provide authorization of the prescription to China Post. That information was provided within 48 hours, but the prescription itself wasn’t released for another four days – for undetermined reasons. Fortunately, this individual had enough of the prescription in question to last through the unexpected delay. Continue reading →

The Underground Grotto and the Papal Letter.

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Yesterday UCAN posted an excellent article on what it characterizes as some of the “positive results,” one year on, produced by the Pope’s landmark Letter to Chinese Catholics, released on June 30, 2007. Unlike most reporting on the after-effects of the letter (or, for that matter, Chinese Catholicism), UCAN’s report doesn’t dwell on Vatican-Beijing relations. Instead, it focuses on the letter’s call for reconciliation between China’s “open” and “underground” Catholics and asks whether progress has been made in forging that consensus.

The article offers a tentative yes, and you can read it for yourself, here.

I mention this now because UCAN’s portrait is both subtle and complicated, and very much at odds with the standard, black and white image China’s Catholics typically found in non-Chinese media (most recently propagated by Frontline and Evan Osnos in the flawed documentary, Jesus in China, which I critiqued, at length, here). Continue reading →