1. Make it easier for foreigners to spend money.
2. Improve English signage.

Make it easier for foreigners to spend money
Very few places, apart from hotels and big tourist restaurants and stores, take credit cards. This would not be too bad if the ATMs were much easier to find and if they worked with our cards. Last night Tom and I had along and frustrating time trying to get some cash. So far, we have found two ATMs we could use, while none of the rest connected(and we must have tried more than a dozen others in various places. In the course of this, we did find out that Beijing has people in place, though, for good customer service. A hostess at the restaurant we’d planned to go to, which was booked solid for the evening, ran after us because we’d gone the wrong direction and said her manager had told her take us to another branch, five minutes’ walk away. But that branch did not take credit cards and we were short of cash. So she asked one of the waiters there to walk with us to try the ATMs in the area. We were unsuccessful, but it was awfully nice of them.

Improve English signage
It’s great that there are English words on so many billboards and shop signs, but too bad that the English is so execrable. At first it’s funny, but on second thought it’s really not good business, and would be so simple to clean up. All business owners need is to rely on an English speaker. The simpler the enterprise, the simpler the language needed. Big developers selling off expensive homes ought to be able to pay for sophisticated slogans that work in English. Here are a few examples:

“pearl adornments with our warmth welcome”

“Taste tea │ Fallow │ Disport”

And on huge billboards for expensive residential space, first an awful example and then one that is perfectly correct, if still meaningless:

Oneself │ Territorism

Life should be like this │ The future is here