I do honor the very flea of his dog

 I find Daniel Dumbrill deeply convincing. Thoughtful, balanced, objective, insightful. Simply outstanding in his work on Xinjiang.

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC6Bl8MTbW9M9MQoPhxbarpw

Would that I had one hundredth his insight back when I was in China.

Slight Return

Not without flaws, yet frequently convincing:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-jlUy2DR8TQ

It could well be that most everything I wrote and thought about China was wrong.

So, China Dirt #3

I shall give some attempt at an answer anyhow.

The problem is – and this can be clearly seen on Chinadirt – that expat women still hold to the Western mode of dating.

“Running Man” ends:-


But if you ever stop running for just a moment and look around, you'll find that all you have are quirky travel stories, boxes filled with pictures of exotic lands, a map punctured with holes, but nobody real to hold while you stand still.



But this is no answer at all. He doesn’t want that. He’ll never want it, and nor will most of us guys here – certainly not in the terms of ‘real’ which you offer; that ‘real’ is a straightjacket, stifling, repellent. Did you think he was trusty and faithful? Did you see no further than his façade, his smooth and tolerant manner? Did you suppose yourself advancing on real ground toward a real heroic man? It was all maya, illusion. ‘Somebody to hold us while we stand still’? – oh, please!

Guys like him, guys like me, guys like us – we who let you down so deep and often – we know romance is illusion, and the more we fuck around, the more clear we are about that.

This life corrupts us; we can’t go back to your limitations of ‘the one’ and ‘true love.’ When we stand still we hear time’s winged chariot – and we run once more. We see the deserts of vast eternity. And this is just why Running Man wants his box of pictures, his map punctured with holes, far more that he’ll ever want you. They are fragments he has shored against his ruin. They are to be his memories when he is old, the proof he existed, lived.

He, like me, like us - we see this woman, that, you, her, she…. Interchangeable, a pack of cards, now you, now you; each an individual, sure, within a certain set of limitations, but in the end shuffleable, changeable. There is nobody ‘real’ to hold us; we each exist alone.

You are not going to change us; it is too late for that. And while Chinadirt as a whole is admirably unconcerned with trying change us, but rather only expose us, some individual contributors surely wish to.

But they are playing by rules we have abandoned -- hence their endless disappointment in us. And because we have left that system, those rules, behind, Western women are generally invisible to us.

Believe it, when I and a thousand others like me walk down the road we do not even see the white women; you are nearly always just invisible to us. An absence, empty air. And on the rare occasions we do see you, all we see – forgive me – is how you are nothing as slender, lithe or trim as a Chinese woman. We look at your thighs, your belly, your butt and think ‘thank fuck’ and ‘I will never date Western again.’

Now I most firmly believe anything a man can do a woman can do; and so perhaps the solution is that Western women should switch over, just like we have. An obvious solution, of course, which is why it has already occurred to expat women. Ah, but -



Not sure if you've tried it but finding a good Chinese man is pretty hard. It's not like the streets are exactly filled with good-looking, funny, socially adjusted Chinese men are they? We're not against dating Chinese guys but you're attracted to who you're attracted to. Lets be honest, Chinese women are often MUCH better looking than Chinese guys. We'd dare say its a 10 to 1 ratio of hot Chinese women to hot Chinese guys. Yeah, you can blabber on about how that's SO superficial but attraction is important. More often than not the hot, funny, cool Chinese guy, already has an even hotter, cooler and funnier Chinese girlfriend so how can we even compete?

Personality is important too and oftentimes many single Chinese guys (and expats) are lacking in that arena as well. If there is a hot, available non-douchbaggy Chinese guy please let us know. We'll be more than happy to date him.



The Chinadirt author of the above is right that attraction is important, and there’s nothing superficial about it. Now I have at times been somewhat critical of Chinese men. But that is because I am a haphazard and slapdash writer. The truth is that China really does have plenty of cool guys, stylish, witty, assured – ride the tube, walk the streets, there they are; sure, they are generally younger, under 30, more often under 25, but that need not hold back any woman. If we guys can date younger, why not women?

Perhaps what Western women do not always understand is that they are just as attractive to Chinese guys as Chinese girls are to us. Now most of the reason we guys chase Chinese women is lust, it is the younger, firmer, sexier body. And you Western women can’t compete there. But lust is not the whole of it; there is pride, too. To have the young, beautiful woman on our arm, that’s our peacock tail, but displayed for other men alone. Look at me; look what I have. When expat meets expat we see this in each other’s eye, in each other’s stride, the slight falter, the hesitation as we pass each other.

There is a card game, ‘Top Trumps,’ each deck of which (and there are various decks to collect) focuses on one area alone – it might be cars, or ships, or tanks, or trucks. The car set, for example, will show various supermodel cars, anatomized; and the players play card against card, choosing one from the various parameters on each – engine size, top speed and so on - with the winner being decided by the better specification. And this is why – when expat meets expat – we hesitate, just a little; for we are still children, still playing ‘Top Trumps.’ Only now – of course – we measure the woman on the other’s arm. Looks? Height? Breasts? Hips? Butt? Dress sense? Deportment? Who’s better, who’s best? We who have been here long enough play the game incessantly – and we know which of our fellow men are new to the game by the grade of woman on their arm. And we are also showing off to those outside the game, the temporary tourists, the guys with the woman of a similar age on their arm. Oh, how we smirk inwardly at you and preen ourselves then!

But this works the other way round too. To a Chinese guy, a Western woman has this same cachet. You’re his status symbol. You’re his prize.

This does not make you a possession. It makes you powerful. So you rightly despondent Western women should play on it, should do just what we Western men do; we know our money and skin give us prestige, and we use it. Why not you?

However – venturing into a generalization, unwise as all generalizations are – I think it is fair to say that most Chinese guys simply would not know how to go about pursuing a Western woman.

Now back home a guy that is too timid to approach you probably would not be worth dating. But you have to dump that Western attitude, just like we have. Fuck, yes, work on superficial appearance, go chat up that good looking guy just because he’s good looking. Once he gets over his shock at being approached by you (and it will be a great shock to him indeed) perhaps you’ll find a guy who’ll treat you a fuck sight better than the average Western expat will.

So try it. Do what we do. Approach the guy, make the first move. Forget the Western expat community, largely made up of bigots, fools and moral and emotional cripples as it is, and see that all the choices China offers to us, it offers to you, too.

It’s not much of a solution, but it’s all I’ve got.

So, China Dirt #2

And China makes it easy for us to lounge through existence, to sink like sediment through the day. It is the difference between Chinese and Western women that allows guys like me, guys in general, to live in the way that gives Chinadirt so much contempt to pour on us.

Chinese women have a very different tradition to follow than Western women. Personal freedom has always been denied to Chinese women by their country’s culture. Even today, for all its patina of modernization, the personal life of Chinese women is still controlled – cabined, cribbed and confined.

Mona, for example, a fantastic former lover, bold and imaginative – Mona represents the best of modern Chinese woman (not that I in any way wish to prescribe what a woman ‘should’ be). But even Mona, smart, confident, determined, funny, even Mona is controlled by the wider patterns of society. Her mother was staying with her for a few weeks, and while Mona was at work, the mother would go through every inch of her flat, her drawers, cupboards, wardrobe. And not at all covertly – to her, it was simply a mother’s right to do this. Mona, being quite up to the minute, has several mobile phones, and one of these she left at home. Her mother read all the messages on it and found one from a lover saying something along the lines of ‘You were great in bed the other night.’ This lover was a Chinese guy, and his message was thus in Chinese, meaning Mona’s mother understood it, as would not have been the case was it from her Western lover.

Mona’s mother was horrified by this, and when Mona came home asked, incredulous, “You are not a virgin any more?” Mona concocted some tale about this being a message she was relaying for a friend. Her mother, Mona told me, did not really believe it.

I suggested Mona could have just told the truth, and said this was how her life was, and she was nothing different in it. But she told me her mother would not have been able to handle that. And indeed she said ‘Already she’s said she wants to die, she’s said “The only reason I’ll stay alive is because of your grandparents”’ – What awful parental blackmail! How little the parents understand their children, and how much they want to control them.

Now of course Chinese women today have far more freedom than even a few years ago, and Mona does indeed live a relatively free life. But even so, she still lives that life within strict confines. She cannot show the reality of it to her mother, and her freedom is thus only a limited, carefully defined level of freedom. Nor can she show the reality of it to most Chinese guys. She, like many of my women friends, has told me several times that too many Chinese guys simply cannot handle the reality of the life today’s Chinese women often live, or at least want to live.

And this is why she is leaving. She wants out. She’s been driven away by the bullshit this culture imposes on her, by its petty restrictions, by its inability to take her for what she is rather than what it would have her be. She’s got her residence visa to another country, going to that freer country like so many of China’s smartest and brightest, going to be more than she can ever be here. Going against the wishes of her parents, who would have her settle down and produce them a grandchild, going against the advice of her boss that she should stay in her easy, undemanding job. Going, and will not come back.

It is this background that is the walls and bars to the cage a Chinese woman dates in. When she dates a Chinese guy, she is usually in that cell, hemmed in by the strictures of a culture that she knows well. Must play the virgin. Must be bashful in bed. Must have no desires but what her man wants.

But a Western guy is outside that culture; and so when she dates him she is free of the imposed attitude of Chinese culture. Dating a Western guy, she has no framework in which to orient herself. Dating becomes a chance for a different level of personal freedom for her, and (too often) an avenue of exploitation for him

Now Western culture gives women far more freedom to dictate their dating lives than Chinese culture does, which is why Western women won’t put up with such bullshit from Western men. This is unarguably a good thing, and if Chinese culture allowed more of this freedom for its women – if China’s women would fight for it -- then their life would not be quite so overwhelmingly shit as it is now.

But no matter how right or just, when guys like me can escape from those expectations of Western women, we don’t look back. Out here we embrace our nature. Yes; it is oafish, crude, and after many centuries of struggle in the West when women have at last gained some measure of respect (though not much) it is profoundly depressing. But this is who men are. Hence China’s concubine system, for example. Men want to fuck around.

The kind of thing we’re escaping from is clear on Chinadirt:-

To the FHMs [Finding himself man] out there I say:

FIND some maturity by getting a real job. And no, filing one story a week to an unnamed newspaper back home, occasional modeling as the token white boy in some baijiu billboard, and “tutoring” Chinese college girls does not count!

FIND some decency by appreciating your girlfriend-the one who cooked for you after 10 hour workdays, ironed and laid out clothes for you when you had interviews, who puts up with your equally immature friends and pretends not to be lonely when you leave her four times a week to go find yourself on Sanlitun.

FIND some courage to tell your girlfriend the TRUTH about the other woman you’ve been seeing so that your girlfriend doesn’t have to hear about it from other sources and suffer a near anxiety attack in the middle of a dinner party being thrown by her boss.

If you were a real man, you’d FIND a doorway out of this little box of selfishness and oblivion in which you live. You’d FIND a way to recognize that living like a nomad does not make you deep, only pathetic. You’d FIND out that responsibility and commitments aren’t evil constraints but realities of life. You’d FIND that you can’t live like a teenager forever!

Well, what a list of demands, Dame Partlet the hen! And you expect us to stick around for all that? That we will listen to your shouty capitals, your martinet demands, when we could be in the arms of a pliant Chinese woman? Come, come. ‘If you are a real man’ – now there are words to send us right out the door.

And so what is the answer? Perhaps there is none, and nor are the writers of Chinadirt looking for any. They certainly don’t want to hear any advice from us expat guys – though I’m sure most of the email they’ll be receiving from ‘my’ community will be the offensive misogynist bullshit we do so well. No, the point of the site is just to expose what swines we expats can be, and that’s a fine thing to be doing. Seems to me (spite of my comments above) the women writing it know pretty well what they’re about. Long may they shout and punch and scorn. Power upon power to you -- You are right, my dears, all your voices are right. We are the inconstant ones.

So, China Dirt #1

For the last few weeks I’ve been reading Chinadirt, where expat women are invited to tell their ‘horror stories from the front lines’ Headlining with a cliché isn’t the best way to make a reader stick around; no more is ‘wierd’ for ‘weird’ and ‘diasterous’ for ‘disastrous.’ Such solecisms may be overlooked in a hurried entry but in the permanent text of a site it might make one suspect sloppy writers are sloppy thinkers.

But no matter to that -- let us look beyond mere pedantry (for I am sure in the many thousands of words below I have made one or two errors) to the meat of the thing.

Here’s ‘The Running Man’:-


You came along when I was slaving away at a job in which each day felt like a tour through every layer of Dante's Inferno. You were like a breath of fresh air rushing through lungs that were drying out from ten hours a day in hell. You taught me to relax. You taught me there was more to life than work, work, work. You assured me that it was OK and even noble to enjoy life.

You seemed to live life so well. "He seems so calm, so happy, so Zen," I thought to myself, "whereas I'm always frantic and stressed." Looking around at the stacks of reports and screen full of unanswered work emails that made up my life, I realized that my long hours in the eternally 23 degrees celsius office had robbed me of the knowledge of even what season it was outside. I decided you, with your carefree manner, jovial laugh and long nights spent bonding with friends, had a better way. Almost spiritual.

I learned a lot from my time with you. I learned to live in the moment. I learned to put friends ahead of meetings. I learned that an extra hour of intimate late night conversation is well worth being tired the next day. I learned to leave work behind when I exit the office.

But the biggest lesson I learned is that you're not the deep, spiritual, life-embracing man I thought you were. You're just a scared little boy.


And then ‘Requiem to a Relationship’:-


Though only a month back, I feel slightly alien when thinking about my New Years resolution. “Ok, me,” I thought, “enough of this relationship hopping. It’s time to refocus on yourself. You can’t avoid the ache of being alone forever.” And then he came along with and in feeling him wrap around me I thought that it would be different this time around, it would be better, it would last. Why worry about the cycle when this was obviously going to be the one that would break it? And so, I dipped my toe back into the pool and was so swelled with hope that I didn’t even realize when I fell in. I didn’t even realize that I started drowning in the idealism of him and me until it was too late.

Then the relationship stopped, killed softly in its sleep with a whimper. Aborted before it was ever even alive, and all the hope that I had been bottling into it floated out dead and limp in a puddle of tears. Then before I knew it, the near decade of hazy transitions fell on me at full force, slamming me with eight years of repressed heartache.


And so on it goes, expat woman after expat woman complaining about what toads and bugs we expat men are, what goats and monkeys.

We know this. This is not news to us.

Of course the most of us are sleazy. Yes, we chase, chase and chase some more and when we get a woman it never satisfies us; of course we treat China as a paradise. Of course; we are gods here and no matter how aged, halt or hopeless we look in the mirror and we see Dionysius, Apollo; we look with the eyes of what Chinese culture allows us to be. Why would we not?

Running Man – So you’re looking for Virgil to lead you out of the Inferno – and god knows you need the advice on poetics too. But the guy you found doesn’t want to be your guide, he’s no Virgil, no. You placed the hatred you have for your job square on his shoulders. But need scares men. We don’t want it. Do you think he wanted to be your savior? It is no wonder he ran. And then when he didn’t measure up to your impossible expectations you cursed him. Oh, I understand why and you’ve got the right of it, no doubt; he is scared, sure, returning the ticket of commitment, thank-you, and leaving. He is a little boy. As are we all.

Requiem for a Relationship – Just like the ‘Running Man’ you have all this need in you, this hunger, and you dump it all on the shoulders of the guy. You see him as what you want him to be, not as what he is, and all your need, your hunger, your vacuum – all on him, all buckling and crushing him. And you seem to know it now, I’ll give you that – ‘I didn’t even realize that I started drowning in the idealism of him and me until it was too late.’ Maybe I misunderstood your writing, but you apparently indicate you knew this guy for less than a month, decided he was the answer to all your needs and then – could you not see it coming? – the relationship was ‘aborted before it was ever even alive.’ Of course it was; you killed it. I tell you, every guy who reads what you wrote – every single one of us – will think just as I thought (for there is little I think that is new) – ‘Thank fuck I never met her’ and ‘Wow, imagine dating a woman like that!’

Get out of your bathtub of self-indulgent mush, stop feeling so damn sorry for yourself and act like a responsible member of the human race. Spine - Spine - Spine! Then we won’t be running away from you because fuck knows, just reading your tense, brittle text, I’m lacing up my Nikes to follow the runner above.

I had a friend, very dear to me, and she gave me this advice: Think of the blue whale. This is not as glib nor absurd as it might sound. ‘Imagine being almost the last of your kind,’ she said, ‘Hunted close to extinction, your environment poisoned. Imagine that.’ And it works, it really does. Think of where you are and where you could be, and it’s pretty easy to say ‘fuck this’ to your maunderings (as this friend did to me, later, though that is another story…)

And ‘Fuck this’ is worth exploring some, for it is at the heart of our experience as expats in China. It is at the heart of what it is to be a male – or at least a male expat in China. We are here and we date Chinese women because we have said ‘fuck this’ to the expectations of dating in the West.

Ah, yes, turning our backs on the West. And here the ‘loser back home’ trope comes in, and what a lazy bit of writing that is. From the site:

Sometimes I feel like one of the main reasons expat guys come to China is because life back in their home countries had gone drastically wrong. What? you're over 30 and have never held a real job? Oh? You failed out of university in your second year and don't have any direction in life? Hm? You're addicted to cocaine and are exiled from your home country? Ah? You have mysterious twitches and smell a bit funny?


Now how breathtakingly arrogant – how passingly patronizing. What, China is such a lowball country that any monkey can hold down a job here? China has no standards? Do you think when Western Firm X wants to expand into China they rummage round the garbage cans out back to find some hapless stooge to send? Or do you rather think they reason ‘We gotta spend a shed of cash on this, let’s pick a live one’?

Yes, sure, we treat Chinese women like shit in the large of it, but that is not because we are failed men. It is because we are men. Just men; and China allows the inner nature that every man holds to come to the surface. It allows us to say ‘fuck it’ to the checks and balances of Western dating; and that freedom, which many men do not get, allows our baser side to show – to an extreme. We don’t come here because we’re rotten; it is rather that the inner rot that lies in the core of most men can grow and flourish here. Like a full-acorned boar, we all want to cry O and mount – as ‘Western Girl’ (from Chinadirt) writes:-

If "western girl" means having enough self-respect not to hop into bed with a man I've known for less than six hours in gratitude for one lousy 60 kuai dry martini, then I'm proud to be a hardass Western girl.

I did think to ask ‘So how much would you hop into bed for? A 600 kuai martini? A 6000 kuai bottle of wine?’ – but the truth of it is you’re right to be proud, angered, on your mettle.

Joseph Conrad, an incomparably great writer, one word of his worth ten thousand mine, wrote of a certain kind of Westerner in Asia:-

‘The majority were men who ... had been thrown there by some accident, had remained as officers of country ships. They now had a horror of the home service, with its harder conditions, severer view of duty, and the hazard of stormy oceans. They were attuned to the eternal peace of Eastern sky and sea. They loved short passages, good deck chairs, large native crews, and the privilege of being white. They shuddered at the thought of hard work, and led precariously easy lives, always on the verge of engagement, serving Chinamen, Arabs, half-castes – would have served the devil himself had he made it easy enough. They talked everlastingly of turns of luck: how So-and-so got charge of a boat on the coast of China – a soft thing; and how this one had an easy billet in Japan somewhere, and that one was doing well in the Siamese navy; and in all they said – in their actions, in their looks, in their persons – could be detected the soft spot, the place of decay, the determination to lounge safely through existence.’

How to get fucked in China

Now some people have cast doubt on the veracity of this blog, so today I shall set out to prove the truth of it. For getting fucked in China is easy. The motherland offers endless ways to get the fucking of your life, a fucking more or less unimaginable in another country, and all you have to do is know where to look. So I’m going to share some of that information with you.

The first thing to decide is who you are. Once you’ve done that, you will know where to find the best fuck possible. Below, a few categories to get going:-

· Miner. Current death toll in China’s mines: about 6000 a year. But if you’re poor and have muscles it’s an easy way to make some money. At the mercy of unscrupulous mine owners, and a conniving, corrupt government, down the mine you go. Feed your family. Send a kid to school. Get your parents the healthcare they need to stay alive. Get fucked. Crushed, gassed, drowned, burned or exploded. Plenty of choice. And not in mines alone – countrywide, an average of 320 people are killed at work every single day.

· Patient. Now you’re at the mercy of doctors who overprescribe expensive drugs to turn a fast buck. At the mercy of hospital administrators who’ll let you die in front of them if you can’t afford their fee. At the mercy of the crooks and thieves who (once more with rapacious CPC officials’ assistance) produce vast quantities of fake drugs. Money! If you threw Zheng Xiaoyu a few dollars, when he was head of China’s State Food and Drugs Administration, you could get a license to produce your own medicine. Before he took over, fewer than a hundred producers got this license. Afterwards, more than two thousand. So take your choice; a fake sugar pill that doesn’t alleviate your symptoms or a poison confection that gives you a whole new set. But China can screw better than that – why fuck individuals when you could fuck the whole country? Take the fake anti-rabies drugs blithely produced by the unscrupulous and greedy, no matter that rabies is currently China’s most infectious disease. And why fuck the whole country when you could fuck the whole planet? Take Tamiflu, a drug that may help stop the next global avian flu pandemic. Tons of it, fake, streaming out of China. But so what? As long as someone makes money, what if 50 million die as the disease spreads unchecked by fake medicine?

· Farmer. Think you have any right to your land? Think again. Expect to be forced off it when the local party guy sells it to a developer. If he’s a commie with a conscience you may get a few thousand yuan share of his millions before he sends in the police to beat you away – or maybe shoot you. Take the village of Dongzhou, for example, where police shot and killed villagers protesting about their land being stolen. How many? The police admit to three, the villagers say 20. But given China’s prowess in such fuckery, who do you believe?

· Student. Assuming you can come up with the bribe to get into university in the first place, there are plenty of ways to get a good fucking here, and the simplest of all is forced sex with your tutor if you’re a cute girl. But how about if you live in northwestern China where, year after year, education leaders shut the schools at harvest time and sent the pupils to work eight to twelve hours a day in the fields? A good hard fuck there for the 18 year old who fell off a tractor and was crushed to death. And what about dancing school that sent 22 of its 15 to 16 year old pupils halfway across the country to work as prostitutes? What of the middle school teacher who forced two sassy girls to drink a bottle of 50% proof alcohol (after which they had to go to hospital) and then beat the boy who stood up for them? Or what about the kids of poor migrant workers? Snobby cities like Shanghai don’t provide education for them, but when the parents set up their own school for the kids, what happens? Shanghai closes it down. So goodbye Jianying Hope School, shut down after 11 years of giving education to poor kids when no-one else would; just one more recipient of the colossal fuck power of China.

· Woman. You get some of the finest fucking China has to offer. Sure, I am doing my best to bed as many of the female population as I can. But I am as nothing to the mighty shafting power of the motherland. Let’s move past the big fact that China has the world’s highest rate of female suicides, and focus on a small fact – Yang Dongyan. He was a farmer who, looking to make a buck, bought a woman (for women are livestock too in China) so that he could sell her on as a bride, making a nice profit. But then he met a pal who told him the woman would be worth more dead. Dead, she could be sold as a ‘ghost bride’ to the family of a recently-deceased bachelor to accompany him as a wife in the next world. And so he murdered her and sold her for a nice 400 dollar profit.

· ‘Ethnic Minority’ – or, as we might also call you, a colonized captive, a slave in your own country, a victim. You’re from Tibet? From Xinjiang? Best to dig a hole and bury your culture in it, for your Chinese overlords won’t let you embrace it – expect to parade you in your national costume at the big Party pow-wows, poor performing bear that you are. Want to learn your own language in school? Want to know the true history of your country? Then bend over for a good CPC shafting. Your country is occupied territory held by force, by might, by anger, a tracked and stretchmarked body, the big pain that leaves you raw, like opened ground. Don’t ever forget it.

· The environment. Ah, now you, dear darling environment, are getting the biggest shafting of all. No wine and roses for you, just straight up against the wall fucked. Oh, did you think the sweet words from Beijing were true? That whispered seduction of ‘In 2006 we’re going to reduce energy consumption per unit of GDP by 4%?’ So naïve of you! It’s the oldest line of all – ‘I care’ - and you fell for it! How did you feel the morning after when you realized consumption increased? How did you feel about those 12 billion tonnes of industrial waste water just in the first half of last year? 70% of your rivers and lakes polluted? But I suppose you must be used to it, ranking 100^th out of 118 developing countries in terms of environmental care.

· A hooker. Now you might think you were getting fucked enough already, what with having to screw any guy with a handful of loose change and bored with his wife. But not so; if you were a hooker in Shenzhen, for example, you recently got fucked good some more when the police rounded a bunch of you up and paraded you in public, reading out your names over loudspeakers.

· A religious believer. Now, sure, if you believe in god you’re deluded. But if your lunatic delusion is of the christian flavor, and prompts you to get together your own religious gathering outside a state-sanctioned church then you’ll better break out the KY and condoms, since you’re going to get it good. As, for example, the nine priests arrested recently for having the temerity to pray in a place that had not been designated as a church by the government. But better to embrace the absurdities of christianity rather than those of falun gong. If you adhere to that particular brand of lunacy, then you can look forward to arrest, a good beating, and then disappearing from site. And that’s just the beginning, that’s just the foreplay. What comes next? Having your organs removed in an army hospital to be sold to the highest bidder, that’s what. China, say thank-you to Japan, say thank-you to Unit 731. They taught you a good lesson, huh? What an eager pupil you prove to be!

· Countryside resident. China has 900 million people in its countryside. Ninety percent of them lack adequate pensions and healthcare. Get this: a survey across China’s provinces found that nearly 70% of elderly people had just one set of clothes. Countrywide, also, only 25% of China’s workers are covered by a pension plan. Best to die before you retire – or else you’ll be fucked by the double whammy of poverty and the neglect of your kids as they zip off to the city to worship the god cash. And yet there are billions of dollars for the vain frippery of putting men in space, billions for the useless expo, billions for the shiny high speed train in Shanghai that doesn’t even work properly and billions upon billions for the army. Yes, China is so enamored of fucking its people that it would rather buy more guns and bombs than a change of clothes for its elderly.

· A journalist – But of course! The greatest enemy in China is the truth, so you guys are in for a particularly good fucking. Still, you’ll have plenty of company – China’s had the highest number of journalists in prison in the world for the last eight years in a row. You deserve it, of course, you journalists. Trying to tell the truth, what arrogance! How foolish of you to think your nation cared about such a trivial matter. And maybe prison is lucky, for you could get fucked as good as reporter Lan Chongzheng, who was beaten to death for asking too many questions about unsafe mines.

· A doctor with a conscience. Consider Doctor Gao Yijie. Under surveillance. Under house arrest. Monitored. Watched. Harassed. Why? Because she showed concern for China’s AIDS patients, many tens of thousands of whom contracted HIV (and thousands more Hepatitis) from blood-selling in the 1990s. What happened? Poor farmers were urged to take part in a scheme where they gave a pint of blood, useful ingredients were extracted, and a pint was put back in. But that returned pint came from the common stock, jumbled in the common box, which was not screened. The result today? Henan Province’s ‘ghost villages’ where most people have died. Consider this:- 300,000 infected with AIDS between 1994 and 1995 alone. The few who are still alive will be dead soon. How many officials or doctors have been punished for this? None. Only those who try to do something about it get fucked. Think of someone else, think of Wan Yanhai. He tried to speak up. Idiot. Bend over, Wan! How about ‘Snow Lotus’ an AIDS awareness group, funded by the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, whose members were harassed by police after they tried to act over 19 kids who had were expelled from school when it was found they had Hepatitis B?

· A blogger. Want to write something anonymously? No way. You have to register with your real name and details. Chinabounder? Oh, they don’t care about foreigners like me. I can do what I want. It’s China’s own people who get fucked by its government. The CPC doesn’t care about me; I am no captive, no prisoner, no helot. I get all the freedom I want in China. It is the Chinese who are kept in ignorance by their wrathful, watchful, suspicious masters. Take Zhang Ming, who was dean of political sciences at Renmin University – was dean, until he was fired for suggesting on his blog that there was too much bureaucracy at the university, suggesting that those in power were appointed for their party connections instead of academic ability. You’d have thought that someone who had got as far as he had knew better than to tell the truth. But that’s how the fucking goes, that is why it is the Chinese who lack freedom in their own nation, kept shut in the dark. Shut in the dark as they increasingly are, as one by one the CPC switches off the lights of the internet. Blogspot, for example, was becoming something too free and truthful. Chinese people – horrors – were beginning to express themselves and – worse! – read the opinions of others, opinions that did not ‘stand where the Party stands’ (those are the words of Luo Gan, one of China’s most powerful men, on the nature of truth). The site is now blocked in China, many blogs far better than mine inaccessible to those lacking the tech skills to get round the great firewall. But so skilled is the government at the lies attendant on a skilful fucking that should you ask them about this they will tell you, ‘We do not censor the internet’ – and will tell it cool and calm, not a blink nor twitch. For they are the most practiced of liars.

· Migrant Worker. For you as for women, as for the environment, an Olympic style screwing beckons. Gold, Silver, Bronze, you’ll always get one. So many ways to get shafted here. What does it matter that you are the people more than any others who have built modern China? How about Wang Jianchang and Liu Yuanping who, when they asked to be paid their wages, were fired, taken to the police station, and put in hand and leg irons? And for women migrants there’s a double dose – 20% of you get fired as soon as you become pregnant.

· In need of financial help. Expect charity and kindness? Know what you’ll get instead? Only one percent of the ten million registered firms in China have ever donated to charity. Eighty percent of the China Charity Foundation’s revenues come from overseas, and just 20% from China. China, where the lucky few who own 80% of the country’s wealth contribute less than 15% of all monies donated to charity. China, whose charities get 0.05% of GDP. Even mean old Britain is better at 0.88% and the USA a shining example at 2.17%. Let’s put that another way. Per capita income in the US is 40 times higher than China – but donations to charity are 1000 times higher. Best not to be poor in China.

….think that is the end of the fucking? It is scarcely the beginning.

A new girl

So there’s this new girl.

She’s quite the head turner. Young, vivacious, full of life, feminine fire to the masculine mud that is so common in China. Even though she’s expected to conform – for everyone must conform in this society – she finds little ways to be an individual – sometimes just her smile, that twist of the body, that sparkle in the eye that is her individuality; or maybe it’s the way she walks into a room, surrounded by people yet still all herself – or the way she answers a question, or asks one. It’s the way she rides her bike, whipping full of life between the more staid cyclists, up on the pavement, dodging between the lampposts. It’s the way she dances to her music, the way she drinks a cup of tea, the way she twirls a pen between her fingers.

From the first time you see her you know she’s special. She’s got that something, that spark of sass, of drive; it animates her, energizes her. She’s full of secrets and laughter, plans and hopes. Her presence fills a room and her absence empties it. She’s not someone you forget. I want to know her, know what her life is, who she is, how, what she thinks.

She’s young, and she’s got her life ahead of her. She’s not going to become a robot, not going to put up with the grind and the shit, with the third-rate university education China offers, with its meaningless lip service to ideas no one believes in. She’s not going to sit through Mao Zedong theory or learn about Hu Jintao’s trite, risible ‘Socialist Countryside’ (that a once great country comes to this!) She’s not going to wear the staid, dull regulation haircut her tutors will want, and she’s not going to get up at 6am in the morning to do their silly physical exercises and go to sleep at 11pm when they put the electricity off. She’s not going to be a good girl for them, quiet, polite, obedient.

Not her. Not for her the three or four years of rinkydink ‘higher’ education nor all the English tests; not for her the semi-slave labor as some prof’s lab flunkey, nor graduation in some cheap, gaudy robe, nor the kindergarten-style routine of the tassel on her mortarboard being moved from left to right. Nor, after that, the fuss and scrape of finding a job, and having to pick out the right clothes and style to make some dull potato of a Chinese guy offer her some shit job with shit wages in a shit firm, with a shit contract that says she must work as many hours overtime as she’s told and must not get pregnant. Not for her the causal abuses of her humanity that getting a job in China requires (for getting a job here is putting yourself on the slave auction block). Not for her putting up with the inept, bashful wooing of office colleagues, their fawning when they chase her and contempt when she declines, nor the constant drip of sexual harassment coded into the country’s DNA; and certainly not marriage to some passionless clod followed by decades of servitude and conformity.

None of this for her.

None of it.

None.

She’ll have no future, she’ll have no life, no chance, no joy, she’ll never grow and develop and explore her potential, what she could be.

Because she’s dead.

Her name was Zhang Yaoyi. She was 11. She was a pupil in a school in China’s central Hunan province.

I imagine her. I see her. She’s sitting at her desk and there’s that smile in her eye, that little wisp of steely will that marks her individuality. She says something to the teacher – Li Hengyi – just a little comment, just slightly too bright and certainly not servile enough, not docile, humble, as all good girls should be.

And then the lunacy that lurks beneath the male skin slithers to the surface.

He smashes her head against the desktop several times, hard, brutal; she falls to the floor. He kicks her, thick, heavy blows from his feet into her stomach, her ribcage. He jumps on her, kicks her head. Already she’s covered in blood and barely conscious. He grabs an iron bar that’s used to pull open the high windows and beats her with it, beats her, smashes her, bloody, murderous, brutal.

And now she’s totally still, blood spreading out over the floor, the soft slick spread of the puddle of red, teeth smashed, fingers broken. He picks her up –picks her up – and carries her to the window. Opens it. And throws her out. Four stories she falls; it kills her.

Dead. Gone. Erased.

And where were all you frothing lunatics then? Where were the witchhunts then? Where was the anger and the outrage? Where were the frenzied press reports? Where were the blog sites calling for this guy’s head?

One Western man has sex with a bunch of women. Women who are adults, who consent freely, and who enjoy it thoroughly. He writes about it, throws in a few run-of-the-mill opinions. Behavior nothing special. Thoughts little new.

Chaos. Millions of madmen fussing and strutting and firing off absurd emails.

Zhang Yaoyi beaten to death by her teacher – by her fucking teacher – and what? A story here, a story there. Page 4 of Shanghai Daily. Ignored by China Daily. A few reports in one day's papers, a smattering of interest from the lazy, idle, muzzled Chinese language press, none of it front page. And then silence.

Nothing much for a few days. More silence. Then a buried-away follow up report that Li Hengyi was mentally ill and thus would face no charges.

He’d been working at that school since 1998, and began to show signs of mental illness in 2001. Li Hengyi’s treatment, which came in late 2003, two years later, lasted two months and then he went right back into the classroom. That’s why he was still there in 2006 – despite it being perfectly well known he beat the kids – and that’s why Zhang Yaoyi died.

So where were you, you angry fuckers? Where were you then? Where was your outrage? Where were the letters to the press?

Silence from you all. I have in class many times raised the name Zhang Yaoyi, written it up on the board, in Chinese and so far not a single student has known the name. Not one!

Unbelievable? Not in China.

Another girl: Zheng Shaojuan.

Zheng Shaojuan was a second-grader, nine years old, in the village of Putian, in Fujian Province. Her teacher , Liang Liyu, sees her peeping at the deskmate’s answers in a math test, and so he – of course it is a he, it is always a he – grabs a broom handle and begins to beat her on her back. She starts sobbing, which enrages our fine, honorable teacher all the more and so he starts hitting her head, blow after blow after blow – all the while her brother, sitting in the row behind, is forced to watch this display of pig brutality. The girl tries to move her body forward, away from the rain of violence and this just adds fury to anger.

What! She tries to get away from him? He jabs the broomhandle into her, viciously rabid thrusts, trying to force her body round so that she will meet his eyes. For how dare she not look at him as he beats her? What disrespect!

And so frenzied are the blows, so great his brutal rage the broomstick snaps in two, splinters of it piercing even through the thick fabric of her school tracksuit and lacerating her skin. His wrath is purged and he’s taught her his lesson. Back to teaching he goes, full of pride at his display of good teaching methodology. Shaojuan spends the rest of the afternoon slumped on her desk. Later, another teacher walks by and sees this and she, having the decency the man did not, acts like a teacher (parent?) should, comes into the class to see what’s wrong with the girl. Shaojuan says she is not feeling well and the woman teacher suggests she goes home; she gets to her feet, shakily walks to the door, respectfully asks permission to leave from Liang, fighting down her shame and anger and contempt, leaves the classroom but collapses, right there, in the corridor, no strength in her body, her head fuzzy, unfocused. Liang carries on not giving a fuck and so the woman teacher helps Shaojuan home, carrying her part of the way.

An ambulance is called but this being China takes an hour to arrive; by that time another child has died in the Chinese educational system. By that time Shaojuan is dead.

And what of Yaoyi, whose bright future, whose hope and potential has been beaten to death, whose parents have been bought off for a mere US$25,000 and are now expected to shut up, seeking no further redress? And what of Shaojuan’s parents, who had gone to other provinces as migrant workers, leaving her with relatives? Of them I have found no trace; for they, being migrant workers, belong to that class of people who have built this country and who are routinely despised, belittled, cheated, abused and subsequently forgotten.

Where were you brave citizens of China then? Where was the anger? Where was the press, so like dogs baying for Chinabounder? The outcry? The mass of internet idiots so concerned about China’s honor and dignity? They offered silence and remain silent. Not a word, not a sigh, not a shrug of the shoulder, not even a raised eyebrow.

Here is an example of the anger I received just because I slept with a few women, just one of the ten thousand emails I got, from luckybulletinyourhead@yahoo.com:

Food, Wine, and Women

Food, you will be eating your own shit covered in shards of blood-stained metal.

Wine, you will be drinking your own blood while drowning in your own piss.

Women, the only bitch you had and will ever fuck is your mother's raw and bloody corpse.

I am supremely confident that you will enjoy the inhumane pleasure of being skinned and buried alive in a metal coffin fill to the top with sulfuric acid 6 feet under a stranger's grave.

Live everyday like your last, one day you will wake up in a bathtub full of ice with parts of your family all around you, I know you will enjoy the smell of dead corpses and you will definitely love to hear the black flies circling you while maggots crawl and burrow themselves under your skin.

It's springtime in Nottingham for me to watch your sadistic and pleasurable misfortune.

Shame on the citizens of China! Your children are dying and your silence is complicit in their death.

Sweetie Redux

Let us press on.

As I was saying the other day, before I got overwhelmed with rantiness (for which I apologize since, let us agree, Zhang Jiehai is scarce worth the time) I’d spent an afternoon looking for a date.

Though those feelers I’d put out came up dry that day, they made for a busier weekend, as each of the women I’d called suggested meets over the next few evenings.

So now it was my turn to put off Holly and Joy, and make time for Sweetie instead, Sweetie who I had not seen and not much thought of since our last encounter. She messaged me from work and suggested we meet for dinner, and since (for me as much as her) this was merely the prelude to sex I took her to the Quanjude restaurant just near where I live, so that it should not take us long to get to bed. It’s a trifle touristy, full of foreigners and fake Qing stuff, and the duck is a little greasy. But it answered to the purpose.

Naturally she arrived holding her gameboy in her hands, engrossed in whatever vapid game she was now playing. This was perhaps just as well, for, having been out with her a few times by this point, I had more or less exhausted all I had to say to her. Having almost nothing in common with her, there was little to talk about. So while her game buzzed and twittered away I leafed through that day’s Spiegel, exchanging the odd comment with her.

But our conversation picked up a little as we ate. She told me about an affair she’d had in the months since I’d seen her. As I mentioned before, she works in a Japanese company and, like Ellen, she seems to have to put up with some weirdness.

Now her boss was a Japanese guy, married, older, and a real brain, too. He’d graduated from Stanford while still a teenager, and was fluent to native speaker level in a fistful of languages. She’s known him a few months and one night, things `just happened.’ But it got fucked up bad, and soon. For he does not trust women, having come through a tough divorce; and is highly traditional and things a woman should be just-so. As Sweetie is highly untraditional, the path off the rails was clear right there. But it went to smash far bigger than just that.

Sweetie knew the wife, too, and had spent time at their home. `That must be quite tough, to have to pretend in front of her?’ I said. But Sweetie was insouciant. `No, not really.. I can do that easily.’

So after one dinner these three shared together, the wife suggests she stay the night, it being late and wet, a situation in which, in Shanghai, finding a cab is next to impossible. And so she stayed, and, a little while after she’d gone to bed, the guy came to her. “I guess just to say goodnight,” Sweetie explained, “But passion took over.. I asked him if he’d locked the door, and he said he had.. and I checked it, too. But then somehow it was open and his wife saw us.. saw us fucking on the bed. And when she saw that she just turned away.”

Upshot was, Japanese guy decided he wanted Sweetie to move in full time, and treat his wife like her sister (which she said to me with a snort of scorn.) The wife, for her part, was unmoved. This was but her duty, as she saw it. The guy told Sweetie – “When we got married I told her I would never divorce her, as long as she did not leave me, but that if I met a woman, and something happened, I might bring her home..” And this, it seemed, was quite acceptable for the wife. It’s a fucking shitty piece of behavior on his part, since clearly an offer like that would not work both ways, and if she took a lover a guy like that would just do one. Scumbag. This wife’s lot is tough, to hear Sweetie tell it. She is merely a slave, walks dutifully behind him, waits on him hand and foot; while he is drinking and laughing with cronies she sits stock still in the next room, tending the tea so she can bring it to each guy as soon as his cup is empty; cannot work, cannot socialize, can do nothing but housework, nothing but tend to him.

And then he tried the same attitude on Sweetie; so, the next evening she said she was going out for a walk and he, “Wait until we are ready to come with you.” She explained she wanted to go on her own, wanted time alone; and he did not like that. And so this putative relationship soon blew up into arguments and fights and she got out of there, back to her own flat.

After our meal it was to this flat she wanted to go, rather than back to my place. And that was fine by me – better, in fact, since it meant I could leave in the morning when I wanted, rather than, if she stayed with me, chafing and fretting until she left.

Not, of course, that she quite said ‘Let’s go back to my flat to fuck.’ Instead, she used the line I generally use, that she could ‘show’ me her flat. So into a cab, and off to Kanping Lu kissing, caressing, touching as we went, to a rather pleasant, leafy part of town, where she had a place on the top floor of a five storey flat. As I walked up the steps behind her, my eyes played across her butt, her legs, the tight short black skirt, the black stockings, looking forward to what was to come, knowing she would soon be dying under me. I fast-forwarded in my head to how it would be when I undressed her, what color panties were waiting my gaze under the fabric of her clothing.

Unusually for a woman, her flat was an absolute mess; but a sexy mess, with bras and panties strewn everywhere, some clean, drying on racks, some dirty, slung to the floor. Reds and greens, silks and satins, frills and bows and laces, blues and blacks…

She made some half-effort to tidy up, before I stopped her telling her it was sexier this way, stimulating; so too was the unmade bed, the duvet half on the floor from when she had got up this morning. I liked it like this; clearly she had not prepared for my arrival, had had little thought of seeing me when she began her day. It was a titillating idea, that she had got out of bed with no particular plan, that her mind had roamed to me and she had called me, sought me, and was bringing me back here to fuck. I liked the casual way of it, the simplicity, and the intimacy too – to see her bedroom as it really is, her life raw, not prepared. It was also sexy because mess like this is more generally the province of a teenager, and while she is 23 or 24, the strewn lingerie made it seem like the room of a younger woman.

And so while she freshened up I lay on the bed, reaching down to pick a pair of panties from the floor, feeling their slick silk texture under my fingers, pressing them to my nose to inhale her scent, and once again running through in my mind what was about to happen.

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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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