I GOT the chop since I came to Beijing - which is good news.
The chop is my office seal. Every work unit, factory, government office, shop and small firm in China has its own individual chop. Without it no business can be done. The chop is as old as China itself. A piece of paper here is not official without the mark of the chop, which can be round, square, rectangular or triangular.
Officialdom in the Orient smells of acrylic resin from the tin of red paste on every desk on to which the hop is pressed before being banged on to paper. The official sound of bureaucracy is the "Bang!" of the chop authorising life to go on.
Almost everyone in China belongs to a work unit and is dominated by the work unit chop, which authorises where they live or travel and countless other aspects of daily life.
Buying an article in a shop, should it be a computer or a bar of means bringing two invoices to the cashier for a double chop - "Bang! Bang! Thank you, ma'am!"
I first learned I needed a chop during an early encounter with Chinese officialdom which became bureaucratic odyssey. At the Customs House to collect some air freighted boxes from Dublin, I was old I could not claim them without a residence permit for Beijing, to which I had yet to apply.
To get one I had to first go to the Foreign Ministry where an official gave me a letter for the Public Security Bureau, located in a lane near Tiananmen Square, requesting them to give me a residence permit.
There I filled out an application form, and presented it to an official along with my passport and press accreditation.
That's when I was told I needed the chop. The application could not be accepted without an Irish Times seal. And I had to apply for permission to get a seal from the bureau, for which I required another letter from the Foreign Ministry.
And it couldn't be any old chop. The design must be formally submitted and approved. A couple of circles around the words The Irish Times in English and in Chinese proved acceptable.
All this accomplished, I was directed to the official chop maker in a workshop next door. He offered a high tech seal, one which automatically inked itself, but in deference to tradition I settled for one with a solid, bulbous, wooden handle. It would be ready in a week, the chop maker said, but it could be made overnight, for a higher fee of course.
Next morning, I returned to the lane beside Tiananmen Square, stamped my application form with a triumphant "Bang!" and presented it to a Public Security Bureau official. He handed it back.
To get a residence permit I needed a document from a Beijing hospital, certifying my good health, with the hospital chop attached. This meant next day doing the rounds of several hospital wards for X ray, general physical, heart, lungs, diaphragm, syphilis and AIDS tests etc to establish that I was healthy enough to live in Beijing.
When you know where to go and have the right documents and a chop, the system works. A few days later I got the residence permit, with the impressive seal of the Public Security Bureau and trekked back to the customs office - only to find that some of my belongings were still en route, delayed at Heathrow Airport, not by Chinese bureaucracy, but western inefficiency.