A tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.

Now here’s another lunatic. Here’s a mouth-frother, here’s a bigot, here’s a stiff-necked buffoon who, in one ranting article, shows all that is wrong, footling and absurd about modern China.

This man is a professor at the Shanghai Academy of Social Sciences. A professor! In this is shown so much that is wrong about today’s China. A country’s educational system should be home the best and brightest, to those who can think, weigh, balance, judge. And instead what does poor China get? Knee-jerk nationalists like this, myopic, thoughtless, a crass dolt who thinks like a sheep, rages like a hyena, and is impotent like a mule. Ah, Zhang, proud Zhang, dressed in a little brief authority, like an angry ape.

And – astonishment piles on astonishment – he is a professor of psychology! A man who should have some insight into the shades and ways of thought, the grades and colors of morality, comes out instead with such an article! Every word of it in a nail in the coffin of his credibility.

Yet this is what passes for the educated in China. This is the caliber of person China has in its most prestigious institutes. What hope can there be for China when people like this educate its young? How can the country ever take its rightful place among the leaders of the world when this is the standard of its thinkers?

I hold my head in my hands as I read his article. I had hoped China was moving beyond such folly; but as I read and re-read what he writes I see how strong the path to failure is, how compelling. If China cannot get past its Zhang Jiehais, what hope?

Look at this man, look, listen, listen and see what modern China can be.

Today, with tremendous anger, I will tell you the story of an immoral foreigner and I call upon all Chinese compatriots to get together and kick this immoral foreigner out of China.

Ah, the pomposity of his tone, the bluster, the arrogance. Yet this is a common thing in China, the group mind, the `all Chinese compatriots’ stance, the suggestion that to be foreign is to be inferior. And then too the safety in numbers stance, the righteous indignation of the crowd. Zhang Jiehai (and he is not alone in this stance) can only see the world in one way; he expects everyone to see like him, think like him. He cannot understand that others might have differing views, cannot see anything but black and white.

And so on he goes:-

This is intolerable and this piece of garbage must be found and kicked out of China!!!

This also is another common knee-jerk phrase that most expats in China will know well. China for the Chinese. We are one. We are us. You are you. You are here only as long as it pleases us.

This is mere variation on the chime most expats will know well, the by-rote patter they hear when they have any complaint about the country -- ‘If you don’t like China, go home!’

Once, he was even shameless enough to say, "I 'm tired of her already. A cunt is a cunt. I keep her just so that I can play with her again."

Which is perfectly true. I did say that. I am not proud of it, but nor will I lie about it. And I hardly think it is a rare attitude. I am sure many guys – and women too – have slept with a person they care nothing much for merely for the pleasure.

This piece of garbage's favorite show is to use obscene and pornographic language to describe the bodies of Chinese women and how they made love. For example, "My dearest Tingting, you have a very good and beautiful body. I cannot stop thinking about your beautiful skin, your lovely, smooth and soft breasts, you sexy, smooth and fine waist, your sweet and pretty legs and arms ... oh, of course, you are so pretty, so sexy and so perfect between your legs!"

Obscene and pornographic? To tell a woman how wonderful she is? The crashing irony of this, that after lecturing me for being dismissive of the average Chinese guy’s romantic skills he shows how few he has, escapes him. To tell a woman she is pretty and sexy is obscene?

While in general Zhang Jiehai reports what I said accurately, I must take issue with his claim that I wrote Chinese men are ‘incredibly ugly.’ It is possible that he merely misunderstood me – for sure he is no thinker, no reader – but I never said anything remotely similar to this.

But what makes it intolerable for me is that this piece of garbage deliberately hurt the feelings of the Chinese national feelings in his class and he openly spoke to divide China.

And there it is again; the inability to conceive that other people might think in other ways. Ah, no such uncertainly for Zhang Jiehai, no; to him all Chinese people think the same, feel the same, are the same. Sure, when I say `Chinese guys are..’ I am `a piece of garbage’; but when he says `Chinese national feelings’ he is nothing but justified, insightful and correct.

As everybody knows, on the 15th of this month, Japanese prime minister Koizumi will visit the Yasukuni Shrine once more and thereby draw strong protests from China and many Asian countries. But this piece of garbage openly wrote on his blog on August 17 to denigrate the nationalistic feelings of the Chinese people!

And again. If I do not agree with `the nationalistic feeling of the Chinese people’ then I must be trying to denigrate China. If I do not think in the Zhang Jiehai approved manner, I must perforce be wrong.

On goes the parade of ignorance:

In the essay "The two fatal flaws of the Chinese people," I praised the Israelis for "hunting down the Nazis" at all costs and then finally sending them to hang on the Israelis' own gallows.

Now while this is true, and commendable, it has little relevance here. As I made explicitly clear in my blog, the justified target of anger is those who were guilty of crimes. Such people are the target of the Simon Wiesenthal center, and rightly so. But in China today, Japanese people in general are hated, merely for being Japanese. In any case, China’s own government suspended action against a large number of Japanese war criminals in the interests of fostering good relations between the two countries.

the Japanese would have apologized to us a long time ago and they would not dream of going to any Yasukuni Shrine.

Man, I am getting to sound as absurd as Zhang Jiehai himself. There is so much lunacy in his article that merely by replying to it I am tainted with his sickness myself. For this particular gem of nonsense I will merely point out what I said before – that Japan has apologized. And I will also ask, can one apologize for a crime one has not committed? Today’s Japanese government, after all, murdered no one. But if one can apologize for the crimes of one’s predecessors, when will the CPC apologize for the 30 to 50 million deaths it caused?

But what does Zhang Jiehai want? For today’s Japanese people to apologize for something they did not do to someone they did not harm?

He even dared to openly engaged in activities to divide China. For example, he once asked a student from Xinjiang: "Is Xinjiang really a part of China?" At the same time, he told his students any number of times: "Taiwan is really an independent country."

And once more I hold my head in my hands. I expect such knee-jerk tosh from students, but to hear it from a professor saddens me greatly. Again – how ever can China hope to become great when this is the caliber of its intellectual elite?

I am willing to listen to the person who tells me Xinjiang is part of China.

Zhang Jiehai is not willing even to countenance the opposite argument. What kind of academic will not even accept an argument that opposes his own? Well, a shit kind of academic, that’s what.

I have talked to several Muslim students from Xinjiang. They most certainly do not feel Xinjiang should be part of China. And as for Taiwan... It simply is a separate country, and there’s no possible way to deny it. Now whether it should be separate or should remain separate is a different argument. But now, today, it is separate. The Taiwanese choose their own leaders; they have their own laws, language, currency, passport. Beijing has zero direct power over Taiwan; and therefore while all sides may preserve the `one country two systems’ fiction, the fact of the matter is that Taiwan is separate. One needs look no further than the international attitude to a Taiwanese passport and a Chinese passport for the truth of that.

It is the job of an academic to try to see things as they are, not as they are wished to be. Zhang Jiehai falls at this elementary hurdle. He is not even on the lowest rung of the path to true intelligence.

For the Chinese women as well as the Chinese men, this is lively and hard-to-find education material!

Indeed. Clearly the kind of education material Zhang Jiehai is capable of producing has no merit.

He gloated: "It is very difficult for western women here. Someone like me will not even glance at a western woman. I treat them as if they are invisible. They don't exist."

This is again perhaps a misreading of my point, and I cannot really criticize Zhang Jiehai on it; after all, I am sure his English is a fuck sight better than my Chinese. Nonetheless, I was not gloating. I was merely pointing out the reality of life in China today.

On one hand, as a scholar and a man,

You are no scholar, Sir. You profane the very word. You have no claim to the title. A scholar is everything you are not. You are merely a bigot and a parasite.

I have relentlessly and directly criticized Chinese men, because I am one of them. On the other hand, I have always been reticent with respect to Chinese women, which included our mothers, wives, sisters and daughters.

In a nutshell, there it is. China man’s attitude to woman. Most thinking women would find such an attitude offensive and patronizing.

Zhang Jiehai, women do not want to be treated with kid gloves, they do not want to be put on a pedestal, they do not want to be treated as works of art. The want to be seen as equals. They do not want your offensive, patriarchal bullshit.

Especially this piece of garbage, who is in the business of an engineer of the soul, and the engineer of the soul of our elites!

And after all this, you have the gall to talk about engineering souls, my lord fool? You who clearly can only engineer the most paltry, staid and desiccated of thinkers?

I am a researcher in psychology.

Barely.

The Chinese women that he dallied with are his students. Outside of China, relationships between teachers and students are strictly prohibited. But this piece of garbage used his status as teacher to deceive his inexperienced female students. We ask how such a beast can be a teacher?

Learn to read, Zhang Jiehai, learn to read. I only get involved with women after they have ceased to be my students.

Our relevant departments really ought to step in!

Ah, yes; if you do not like what someone else says, shut them down. And you call yourself an academic!

The most valuable hint is that he went to the Tianping Hotel with a female student and the room has no window. Everybody knows that very few hotel rooms have no window (I have never encountered a windowless room). When I went to check at the Tianping Hotel, they really did not have any windowless rooms.

This is perhaps the most astonishing comment of all. This man went to a location I claimed to have been to see if it existed. He sees some blog on the net and gets so righteous indignant about it that he turns himself into Sherlock Holmes. He did this; he went to the Tianping Hotel to ask them about their rooms. What a bumbling, impotent buffoon! And this is the caliber of China’s academics. This is what they worry themselves about? I am just one guy, of no especial importance, not much more or less than many expats and certainly no different to a goodly number of local men, who cheat and cog and play just as much as I do.

Listen to yourself, Zhang Jiehai, listen to yourself.

If people think that there is a foreign language teacher who fits these descriptions, or otherwise find valuable clues, please leave a comment at my blog or contact me directly via email.

Netizens and compatriots, if you are a Chinese man with guts and if you respect Chinese women, please join this "Internet hunt for the immoral foreigner"! Let us act together! I believe in the power of the Internet, because I believe in the power of the Chinese people!

I am just aghast at this. Truly, I fear for China. Not just because of the utter paucity of thinking, life, truth and honesty that typifies the Zhang Jiehais of today’s China, nor just that if he is any representative of the country's academic quality China is doomed, but also because in calling for a witch-hunt he calls for ugliness and hatred, he calls for fascism, he calls for ignorance.

Zhang Jiehai, you are a far greater danger to China than ever I could be. You spread ignorance, lies and poison; you stifle thought, freedom and intellect. You are stupidity, folly, contempt.

It is because of people like you that so many of China’s best and brightest seek education abroad. You have nothing to offer the young of today’s China but bankrupt ideas and meaningless platitudes. You drive the finest minds of China to the West. You have nothing to say. You have nothing to teach.

Poor China, to still be so hurt by her own people!

(This entry was edited after posting to correct the fact that Zhang Jiehai is a member of the Shanghai Academy of Social Sciences, not the Chinese Academy of Sciences. Part of my anger at Zhang was that I erroneously thought he was a member of the CAS, which has had my respect for a long time. They have some truly outstanding thinkers and researchers, and I was disappointed to see a clod like this among their ranks. I will let the entry stand; but I offer an unreserved apology for having briefly traduced the CAS)

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