"We only take guests from the Mainland"

The Covid pandemic (or rather, the government response to the pandemic) has changed life in China in all sorts of ways, and travelling within the country has become far more difficult. One thing on which not many have commented, probably because it only affects the few foreigners still left here, is how hard it has become to find hotels that will accept foreign guests.

To be clear, it has long been the case that not all hotels in China accept foreigners. This did not start with the pandemic. In fact, it has probably been true since Maoist times. In his classic memoir River Town, Peter Hessler recounts being rejected by hotels in Western China for being a foreigner back in the late nineties. 

Personally, I have experienced hotels turn me away for as long as I've been in China. For instance, in 2013 I once travelled to Shijiazhuang, the capital of Hebei province, 300 kms south of Beijing. Before going I booked a room in a 如家酒店 (Home Inn), a chain of hotels with branches all over the country. I arrived at 11 pm, only for a smiling young clerk to tell me apologetically that unfortunately they could not accept foreign guests. Never mind that when I called the chain's national service line to book, I had specified that I was a foreign citizen. After making some phone calls, a (more expensive) hotel that could take foreigners was located nearby, and a taxi was called to take me there (at my own expense of course). 

This sort of annoyance isn't limited to remote parts of the country. It happens in cities like Beijing and Shanghai as well. On one occasion in 2017 I booked a room in a cheap hotel in Shanghai, only to arrive late at night and be told that they were unable to take foreigners. I had booked with an app on my phone, and it did specify somewhere amongst the reams of writing (in Chinese) that the hotel does not accept foreign guests, but I hadn't even thought to check. Luckily another chain hotel down the road was able to take me. 

In my experience, finding Chinese hotels that welcomed foreigners had been getting harder for years even before the Covid pandemic struck. I don't think the regulations changed; quite simply, enforcement got stricter. In the past, some hotels were happy enough to bend the rules. If a foreigner travelled alongside locals, they would simply register the Chinese guests with their ID and ignore the foreigner. If they travelled alone, the hotel might let them stay without registering them and take their cash. 

After the change in China's leadership in 2012, laws and regulations started to be enforced more strictly in all fields of life, including this one, and finding hotels that would acquiesce to foreigners staying illegally became harder. In 2019, I once spent hours wondering around the centre of Kunming late at night, trying to find a hotel that would take me in. Place after place rejected me, saying they could not accept foreign citizens. In desperation I looked in an app and found a 5-star hotel in the suburbs that purported to take foreigners. After calling to make sure, I took a taxi there and checked in. I ended up spending far more money than I had intended. 

It is true that the hotels that reject foreigners tend to be the cheaper ones. But it is not true, as people sometimes claim, that foreigners are only prevented from staying in grotty places that are unhygienic or unsafe, and that these rules are there to "protect" foreigners or to make sure they come away with a good impression of China. During my time in China I have been rejected by numerous hotels that were perfectly decent, and accepted by others that were horrible.

Unlike many believe, it does not in fact appear to be true that hotels in China need a special permit to accept foreigners. At least, there is no national regulation that states this. There used to be, but it was abolished in 2003. Quite simply, article 39 of the Foreigners Entry and Exit Management Law states that hotels must register foreign guests according to "applied regulations" and report the registration to the local police authority. 

Foreign citizens in China are supposed to register with the police within 24 hours of arriving in a locality. If you are staying in a hotel, they are responsible for registering you. While the hotels should be able to register foreigners automatically in their computer system, some of them may have to go to the police station to do this in person because their system does not accept foreign passport numbers (or it does, but they are unaware of how to use it).

It's always hard to get to the bottom of these things, but it seems that many of the hotels that refuse foreigners would be legally able to accept them, but want to avoid the hassle (or perhaps the scrutiny) that comes with registering them. It is also entirely possible that local authorities in various parts of China formally or informally prohibit or discourage hotels from taking foreigners, especially ones that are cheaper or not part of an international chain. Apart from anything else, this ensures the foreign guests spend more money.

Much probably depends on the attitude of local authorities and the police, which may explain the seemingly random way in which hotels in some areas are much more relaxed about having foreign guests than in other areas. When I travelled in western Hunan in 2018 pretty much every hotel seemed to accept foreigners, even in quite remote places, while in a relatively cosmopolitan city like Kunming finding a place to stay was a struggle. 

It is even possible to argue that the widespread practice of hotels rejecting foreign guests is actually illegal under China's Consumer Protection Law. Some claim that if you call the hotel and threaten legal action, they will take you in. I've never tried this, but I find it unlikely it would work in all cases, especially when local authorities have exerted pressure in the other direction. In any case, this is hardly how you want to spend your time when you travel. 

It must also be added that it is not only foreign citizens who get rejected in Chinese hotels. Certain Chinese minorities, particularly the ones native to the two regions that the government considers "restive", are also regularly (and shockingly) refused accommodation. The motivation is quite possibly the same: too much hassle from the police and local authorities, which puts hotels off from accepting them. 

Essentially, the issue appears to be that if you belong to a group seen as a potential national security issue, or more recently a public health threat in the case of foreigners, your movements need to be monitored and controlled. This makes you a source of hassle and potential trouble. It may be nothing personal, but hotels don't want you (or have been told not to take you). Perhaps uniquely in the world, hotels rejecting guests has become one of the most overt forms of discrimination in China. 

The booking page for a hotel in Sanya on a phone app. The encircled line says "we only accept guests from Mainland China".

Since the pandemic hit, finding hotels that will let foreigners stay has become much, much harder than it used to be, probably due to the general paranoia about us bringing Covid in from the virus-infested outside world. It used to be pretty much guaranteed that, no matter where you went in China, you would still find plenty of hotels that would accept foreigners too. This is no longer true today. 

In vast swathes of China, especially in the North and West, upwards of 90% of hotels no longer give rooms to "international friends" at all. The few that do are often the most high-end ones (4 stars and above), making travel within the country much more expensive and inconvenient. 

When I travel in China, I usually book hotels through the Tongcheng Travel (同程旅行) mini-program which I access through WeChat. I have learnt to always read carefully through the hotel's "policies" to see if I can spot the little phrase 仅接待大陆客人 (we only take guests from Mainland China), which appears depressingly often. In some instances they will say 仅接待大陆及港澳台客人 (we only take guests from Mainland China, Hong Kong, Macau and Taiwan), which is slightly more generous but still of no use to me (also take a second to reflect on how crazy it is that, 25 years after the handover, plenty of hotels in the Mainland won't even take Hong Kongers). Some of the places that carry this warning may turn out to take foreigners anyway, and some that don't still won't take you. It's all quite unpredictable.

It must be said that the situation still varies by the province. Last year I found it much easier to find accommodation in Hainan and Guangdong, both provinces that tend to be much more open to the outside world. A couple of hotels in Hainan did cancel my booking once they realised I was a foreigner, one of them a fancy resort in Sanya, but the second place I tried was always happy to take me.

Once you get away from touristy areas in the South, however, finding accommodation as a foreigner has become a struggle. Even in the outskirts of Beijing only 4/5-star hotels seem to accept foreign citizens at the moment, at prices that start from 6-700 Yuan a night. It used to be possible for foreigners to stay in 农家院 (rural homestays) in the mountains around Beijing with no questions asked. But on a recent trip of mine to such an area the local homestays (which double as restaurants) were wary of even letting me eat there, because they'd been told to report any foreigners they received.

If you travel somewhere and the handful of places that take foreigners are fully booked, then you're out of luck. Last year when I travelled to Yushu, I found that out of the dozens of hotels in the prefectural capital only three accepted foreigners. All three hotels were already sold out for the dates of an annual horse-riding fair, when people pour in from the rest of the county. I was going back to Beijing around that time anyway, but I ended up leaving a day early because of this. 

The fact that more and more hotels around China won't let foreigners stay is an unwelcome development but not a surprising one, at least for me. It's part of a general trend towards closing off which started well before the pandemic, but has been heavily intensified because of it. There is much speculation about when China will give up on its policy of  "dynamic clearance" of Covid and move towards some sort of coexistence with the virus. I have no idea when this might happen, but when and if the policy is abandoned it may take years before some of its unfortunate side-effects are rolled back, including this one. 

Even if one day China's borders open up again, I think foreign travellers who come here are going to find a country vastly less easy to travel in than the one they remember.

If a low birth rate is China's problem, why isn't foreign immigration the solution?

So China's two-child policy is now officially a three-child policy. This development will have come as no surprise to anyone who follows Chinese politics. It's been obvious for years that the Party-State now feels its people are having too few children, not too many. 

One thing this decision makes clear is that the Chinese state simply cannot imagine giving up on its family planning policies altogether and legalising all births, including those outside of marriage. Children have to be born to a heterosexual married couple, and there has to be a limit on the number of children per couple, even when the limit is so high as to be academic in most cases. I suppose that, as well as promoting conventional lifestyles that are good for "social stability", this ensures the countless people who work for the family planning departments across the country will keep their jobs. 

In any case, this new policy is going to mean very little in practice, because the average Chinese family simply isn't interested in having more than two children. In fact, in middle class environments, many couples don't want more than one. When asked why, they will usually claim that having a child is simply "too expensive". This is, in my view, mostly because of the kind of stresses and expectations that the system places on parents and that they place on themselves with regards to their children's education. 

Policymakers are not unaware of this. The Politburo meeting in which the shift was announced also promised supportive measures to address the structural issues that are preventing couples from having more children, including "improving prenatal and postnatal care services, developing a universal childcare service system, reducing family spending on education, strengthening tax and housing support, and safeguarding the lawful rights and interests of working women", as the Xinhua report puts it. 

This all sounds sensible, but most experts agree that it won't be easy to change the basic trends. China's fertility rate stood at just 1.3 children per woman in 2020, which is as low as countries like Japan and Italy. In previous years fertility rates weren't much higher. Few believe they will start growing again. 

A Mao-era poster, saying more or less "if you want the countryside to prosper, have more children who can plant trees". 

 

I happen to think that in the long run lower fertility rates carry real advantages, particularly for an overcrowded country like China, where a lower population will put less pressure on the environment and allow for a better quality of life. But this does not cancel out the fact that an ageing society will lead to real economic and social problems for at least a generation, and doubtlessly cause the leadership to worry about China failing to overtake the US.

European countries with low birth rates have basically addressed the issue through immigration. This has allowed them to replenish their workforce by absorbing newcomers, rather than trying to drive up their own birth rates and contribute to environmentally-deleterious global population growth. Foreign immigrants currently make up 9.4% of the EU's population, and immigrants from outside the EU make up 6.3%. 

Prosperous and ageing East Asian countries are also turning to the same solution, albeit it to a lesser degree. Japan may have a reputation for being monocultural and unwelcoming to outsiders, but it has in fact begun to open its doors to foreign immigration. The number of long-term foreign residents in Japan was 2.23 million, or 1.75% of the population, in 2015. Admittedly some of those are Japanese Brazilians, or Zainichi Koreans, but most are recent immigrants from other Asian countries with no prior links to Japan.

South Korea has gone even further down this path than Japan, with between 2 and 5% of the population made up of foreign immigrants, depending on whose figures you believe. In Taiwan foreign residents make up around 3% of the population, mostly blue-collar workers from South-East Asia. Taiwan even offers immigrants a reasonable path towards naturalisation.

The entrance to Yokohama's Chinese neighbourhood, Japan.

The logical solution for China would be to go down the same path. If it only allowed immigration, China today would not be an unattractive option for young people from countries like Bangladesh, Indonesia and Vietnam, or even places further afield like Nigeria or Egypt. Wages for unskilled labour in China are already significantly higher than in most of Asia and Africa, particularly in China's richest cities and provinces. There are many people around the world who would not be unhappy to work in a factory or a restaurant in places like Shanghai, Tianjin or Fujian province. There are also plenty of young people with degrees who would be happy to learn Chinese and boost their skills with an office job in one of China's big cities.

The reality, however, is that China is showing no signs of moving in this direction. None at all. Foreigners aren't allowed to take up unskilled jobs in China, with extremely rare exceptions. Only professional jobs are open to foreigners, and even those only to a very limited extent. For years the Chinese government was happy to court foreign students with scholarships (even those are now drying up), but the expectation was always that the students would go back home after finishing their degree. The tight rules around work visas for foreigners make it almost inevitable that they end up leaving.

The data from China's last national census, released just last month, show that there were over 845,697 foreign citizens living in China in 2020. This is more than 2010, when the last census was taken, although both Beijing and Shanghai have actually seen a significant decrease in the number of foreigners. Much of the increase probably comes from a trickle of Vietnamese and Burmese citizens moving to South-Western China. There are also bound to be many ethnic Chinese counted among the foreign residents, some of them people who were born in China and later emigrated and changed citizenships.

For a country of China's size and level of development, these figures are nothing. They mean that foreigners account for about 0.05% of the population (and this is without mentioning that numbers are currently in free-fall, as foreigners in China are getting fed up with the Covid-19 border restrictions that make it impossibly hard to leave to see family and then come back). Even India, a country of similar size and much poorer, has around 5 million foreign residents (most of them coming from neighbouring countries like Bangladesh and Pakistan). The reality is that, in terms of openness to foreign immigration, China is an outlier in the modern world.

From a purely economic perspective, it would make sense for China to open up more to foreign immigration, both skilled and unskilled. The obstacles in the way of this are clearly political, not economic. Modern China's sense of identity has been constructed upon a nationalism that is frankly exclusionary. If it is hard for ordinary people in most countries to accept the concept of having to compete with foreign immigrants for jobs and resources, and there isn't a place in the world where it doesn't cause resentment, in China it would be particularly tough for the public to swallow the idea. 

An episode from last year made it starkly clear how opposed the Chinese public is to even the most timid attempts to make it easier for foreigners to live in their country. In early March 2020, China's Ministry of Justice published the draft of a new regulation on the eligibility of foreign citizens to apply for permanent residency (PR). The draft was published in order to gather public feedback, as is customary in Chinese lawmaking (this might well be one of the most democratic features of Chinese governance, although it doesn't apply to all laws). Unfortunately, this move quickly ignited a storm of racist and xenophobic discourse.

The proposed new regulations would only have made it very slightly easier for foreigners to apply for China's permanent residency cards, which are some of the hardest in the world to obtain. It's hardly like they would have "opened up the floodgates" of mass immigration to China. Far from it. In spite of this, the publication of the draft regulation was met with a flood of truly nasty comments on Chinese social media. Most of those commenting were not reacting against the slightly more relaxed new rules, but against the concept itself of giving foreigners permanent residency in China, something that they probably did not even realise was possible.

Sixth Tone translated one egregious Weibo post that received 22,000 likes: "In a hundred years' time, I don't want China to have become like the US, with all kinds of people mixed together. We Chinese people have a strong national sentiment. We have the same ancestors, we're all children of the Yellow Emperor, the same blood courses through our veins." Many said the presence of foreigners would make China less safe and diminish the country's sense of patriotism. There were also lots of outrageously racist comments about black people, condemning them as a pathologically lazy and degenerate race who should be kept out of China at any cost; others ranted against blacks and Muslims in language that seemed to be taken straight from Grayzone, and vowed to protect Chinese women from foreign men. 

Of course social media is known for attracting horrid sentiments, and not just in China. But in this case the large number of upvotes received by the most racist comments, and the almost complete lack of pushback against this avalanche of xenophobic feeling, make it pretty clear where people's hearts lie. Or one can also look at other examples from recent years, for instance the xenophobic comments that flooded social media after a Pakistani student was stabbed to death by a local citizen in Nanjing over a small argument in 2018, or the rap song in Chengdu dialect that came out in the same year entitled "Stupid Laowai", ending with the singer literally inciting violence against foreigners. And all this is in a country that barely even has any foreigners to begin with.

Another common complaint is that foreigners are already too privileged, a trope that is just as widely believed as the one about China's ethnic minorities enjoying special privileges, and equally based on a mix of truths, half-truths and misconceptions. Many of those protesting the new regulations compared the "ease" with which a foreigner can acquire permanent residency (in fact it isn't easy at all) with the difficulty for Chinese citizens to apply for a Beijing or Shanghai hukou, or asked whether foreign residents would also be subjected to restrictions on how many children they can have. 

These complaints are best seen as a case of homegrown Chinese frustrations being shifted onto foreigners, who bear no particular responsibility for them. Such attitudes guarantee that any future easing of the rules on foreign immigration will be perceived by the broader Chinese public as one more unearned "privilege" which places foreigners above locals.

Elon Musk at the meeting with Li Keqiang in which he was offered Chinese permanent residency. He didn't take up the offer.

Public opinion may be firmly opposed, but it is not like Chinese policymakers themselves are giving any signs of being interested in encouraging immigration. The continued difficulty of applying for ten-year permanent residency cards, the one thing that allows foreigners to settle stably in China for a reasonable amount of time, is a symbol of this. The current conditions for applying for permanent residency are skewed towards those with extremely high skills in certain sectors, mostly high-tech industries, and CEOs and other people with very high incomes. Such policies cater only to people who probably have no wish to settle in China anyway, while ignoring most of the foreigners who live there, speak the language and could make a real contribution. 

Over the last few years it has been made slightly easier to apply for the PR permits, but it is still very difficult by international standards. The number of foreigners that has obtained one probably numbers in the thousands, and many who have lived in the country for years are still ineligible. The government did however offer permanent residency to Elon Musk, who must be the sort of immigrant they are looking for. Strangely, he chose not to trade his $37 million Bay Area estate for a fancy flat in Sanlitun or Pudong. The permits are also granted more readily to foreign citizens of Chinese ethnicity, both officially and in practice, reflecting the fact that overseas Chinese are still seen as somewhat more deserving of the right to live in China. 

What is certain is that half-hearted efforts to attract top-end scientists, engineers and venture capitalists are not going to solve the country's demographic problems, even in the unlikely event that all the Nobel prize winners and Elon Musks of the world suddenly decide to pack their bags and move to China. 

Of course, if one day the official attitude towards immigration becomes more positive, then public opposition does not have to be an insurmountable obstacle. The government/party has a way of doing what it feels is necessary, and getting the public to go along with it. It is possible to imagine that schemes might be implemented along the lines of those in the Gulf countries, with people brought in from poorer countries to work in factories or construction projects, placed in dormitories, and expected to leave once their contract is over. This might be better accepted by the public, although it could still cause resentment. 

Another possibility is that the development of automation and robotics will make the importation of cheap labour less necessary in future. But even then falling birth rates will still be a reality, and the people who run China clearly feel this to be a problem, with or without automation. 

On xenophobia and administrative overreach

The Covid-19 pandemic has brought to light and exacerbated tensions and inequalities that already existed all over the world. Among its many side-effects it has engendered fear and suspicion towards foreigners and minorities, or sometimes even people from elsewhere in a country, as possible carriers of a dangerous virus. Initially it was the Chinese, or those who looked like they might be Chinese, who found themselves under suspicion around the world, but later on many other groups started feeling the heat.

In China too, the possibility that foreigners might carry the virus with them from abroad has turned into a driving factor, and an excuse, for xenophobia. The EU Chamber of Commerce in Shanghai recently surveyed its member companies, and found that discrimination on the basis of foreign nationality or appearance had been experienced by 39% of respondents or their colleagues. And this is in Mainland China's most cosmopolitan city, known to be far more friendly to outsiders than the rest of the country. Over half of respondents felt that reports in the local media portraying the virus as "imported" are fuelling xenophobia.

The phenomenon began in earnest towards the middle of March, when it became clear that the pandemic was mostly under control within China and exploding in the rest of the world. At this point the big concern in China became new cases of Covid-19 imported from abroad. Very quickly, levels of fear and discrimination towards foreigners living in the country skyrocketed. 

In cities across China, people who do not look Chinese started having unpleasant experiences: locals very obviously refusing to sit next to them on public transport; being refused entry into shops, restaurants and shopping malls based solely on their features and skin colour; being barred from entering xiaoqu (gated neighbourhoods) for being foreign, while Chinese people entered quite happily; taxi drivers refusing to pick them up; being monitored by their neighbourhood committees and local officials to a greater extent than their neighbours; and in the worst cases, being yelled at or berated on the streets, even in spite of wearing a mask. Hotels started rejecting foreign guests to an even greater extent than usual, very often citing directives from local officials. In most such situations, being able to show a green code on Alipay's Health App made no difference: no foreigners meant no foreigners, green code or not.

Never mind that the great majority of "imported cases" of Covid-19 actually belonged to Chinese citizens returning from abroad, of whom there was a much bigger number than there were foreigners entering the country. Never mind that the only person guilty of flying to China while purposefully concealing that she had coronavirus symptoms was a Chinese lady living in Massachusetts, who returned home because in the US she had been repeatedly denied both a test for the virus and hospitalisation (she got into serious trouble when the Chinese authorities understood what she had done). In spite of all this, foreigners suddenly became a prime target both of the people's anxiety and of official measures.

Of course, foreigners in China are not all equal. Wealthy foreign executives living in Shanghai may have felt almost no inconvenience at all. Others have been less fortunate. The worst of it, by far, has been experienced by Guangzhou's African community. The city has China's only real African enclave, an area where traders from all over the continent reside and do business. Although the community has been dwindling for years, partly due to greater strictness in the enforcement of visa regulations, it still exists. 

Towards the end of March, numerous personal reports emerged of Africans who had not travelled outside of China for months being locked into their flats by the authorities and tested repeatedly for the virus. Others were kicked out of their homes by their landlords, while the police refused to help. Those kicked out often spent days wandering the streets, unable to find hotels that would welcome them or even restaurants and shops that would let them in. Groups of volunteers, mostly Chinese, helped bring them food and find them places to stay.

This wave of xenophobia quickly gained attention in the international media. The Guardian and the New York Times both ran features on the general animosity towards foreigners that was sweeping over the country, while numerous outlets reported on the plight of the Africans in Guangzhou. Coverage wasn't limited to English-language media either, as this Italian report can testify.

The mistreatment of Africans led to a real diplomatic crisis. The reports, corroborated by video evidence, sparked a wave of indignation across the continent, and led to Chinese ambassadors being read the riot act in Nigeria and various other countries. Photos of a sign outside a McDonalds in Guangzhou stating that the establishment could not accept black customers further inflamed the public. Unsurprisingly the Chinese authorities denied anything was wrong and blamed the foreign media for slandering their country, but it seems they also quietly took some action to rein in the discrimination. Perhaps they realised what an own-goal the whole thing has been for the country that is the biggest creditor and trading partner for the African continent as a whole.

In any case, the worst of the paranoia about foreigners seems to be over for now, especially since foreign citizens have been unable to enter China for months except in special cases (not that most of the public is aware of this). Even the new outbreak of Covid-19 in Beijing in June does not seem to have led to a significant upturn in xenophobia, perhaps because the origin was clearly local (although they did their best to link it to imported salmon). In spite of this the problem still lingers, with occasional reports of foreigners being singled out for attention by the police and of bars not allowing foreigners in, particularly in Beijing. It is worth pointing out that in many of these cases "foreign" simply means non-Chinese looking, since it is features rather than nationality that cause people to be singled out. Many international students in China have also found themselves locked in their campuses for months on end, even as life outside goes back to normal.

For long-term foreign residents this turn of events will sadly not be too surprising (except for those who insist on remaining wilfully naive, of which there are many). Chinese society clearly has the potential to act like this, especially in times of crisis. Scapegoating of foreigners is a real problem, particularly for black people but also for other foreigners. The narrative that foreign citizens enjoy special privileges has long allowed the public to rationalise and justify any mistreatment they may face. 

Back in March cases of foreigners going out while they were supposed to be self-quarantining, behaving badly towards staff while under centralised quarantine, or picnicking in parks without masks (very often next to Chinese people doing exactly the same thing) were widely publicised by the media and pandered to the preconceived idea of "entitled" foreigners not respecting the rules, while cases of discrimination went unreported. There is no doubt that this media-driven sentiment helped to create the unfortunate situations described above, as well as an outpouring of online xenophobia (for an example, see this). 

There are those who have tried to minimise the issue, claiming that in the end anything suffered by foreigners in China is nothing compared to what Chinese and Asians have had to put up with in the rest of the world. And indeed, cases of verbal harassment and even violent assault against people of East Asian origin due to Covid-19 have been sadly numerous, particularly in Western countries. But then again, surely being kicked out of your flat and spending days on the street or being locked inside your home simply for being African should count as being subjected to a form of violence? 

Even if we take the less extreme forms of discrimination that have surfaced against other foreigners in China, we are still talking about things that would cause a riot in most of the world, including barring people from entering shopping malls and staying in hotels due to their foreign passports and/or appearance. It is true that this xenophobia has not, generally, descended into violence, but it has been institutionalised and accepted by society to an extent hardly seen elsewhere. 

Having said all of this, xenophobia and racism are probably not the only culprits here. It is undeniable that some foreigners, and especially Africans, have been subjected to real discrimination in China due to Covid-19. On the other hand, much of what they have been through is not different from what people from Hubei, and especially Wuhan, experienced at the start of the pandemic. After the Spring Festival, Chinese citizens with a Hubei ID living in other parts of China found themselves targeted by local officials and ostracised by the public. Hotels wouldn't let them stay. Neighbours shunned them, especially if they had got back from Hubei shortly before the province was sealed off. In some cases families literally had the doors to their flats chained shut by local officials, mirroring what would happen to Africans in Guangzhou a couple of months later. In another case, a county in Hebei offered a literal reward to anyone who could report people from Wuhan.

It is clear that in both cases, much of what has been driving this behaviour is the huge pressure on local governments to stop the virus from spreading in the areas under their watch. It is made clear to local officials that this should be their one and only priority. In order to achieve it, they are quite ready to subject any group considered "at risk" to unreasonably harsh measures, whether it's people from Hubei, Africans or foreigners in general. Sometimes the measures are so broad as to be absurd, and target people regardless of their travel history, evidence of being tested etc... I am sure it would be equally effective to target people in a more focused way, rather than treating entire groups as if they literally have the plague. But why not be on the safe side? The rights and comfort of the people in question aren't believed to matter, and almost nobody will step up to defend them in the current climate. In fact, much of society seems happy to pile on, driven by fear and latent resentment. 

China's system of governance has been highly effective at containing the pandemic within its own borders (notwithstanding the mistakes made right at the start, which deserve their own debate). It would be wrong to deny this just because official statistics are unreliable, as some have tried to do. Covid-19 outbreaks cannot easily be covered up, and there is good evidence that outside of Hubei the virus never really took much hold. Masks alone cannot account for this success. Mass testing, tracing, centralised quarantine, strict lockdowns and neighbourhood committees enforcing the rules all played a part. On the other hand, before heaping praise on China's response it is important to understand the inevitable side effects of a system where the "good of the nation" is put above the rights of individuals and of entire groups. How effective different countries and political systems have been in their response to Covid-19 is going to be a major talking point for years to come. That is why it is important to see the full picture, lest we fall prey to easy rhetoric.

Whataboutism and viruses: the coronavirus and H1N1 outbreaks

Over the last few days, an article entitled "Something's Not Right Here Folks" | A look at USA 2009 H1N1 Virus Compared to China 2020 Corona Virus has been widely shared and read on Chinese social media. The original article was published on LinkedIn, perhaps the only major Western social media site still unblocked in China, so English-speaking Chinese started off by sharing the original. But a Chinese translation quickly appeared, and now it is being shared more widely on WeChat and Weibo. Unfortunately this fits in with a general pattern: articles written by outsiders that coincide with the worldview which the Chinese government wants to promote often get translated and spread widely within China, while foreign contents that does not fit in with this worldview quickly gets censored.

The article in question is based on a kind of whataboutism which has become widespread on the internet: the argument is that China's handling of the coronavirus outbreak has been much more responsible and effective than the US's handling of the 2009 outbreak of the H1N1 virus (ofter referred to as the "swine flu" at the time). It is also claimed that the international reaction to the coronavirus outbreak smacks of racism and double standards, since in 2009 Americans were not prevented from travelling to other countries or in any way quarantined or shunned, as is now happening to Chinese citizens in certain places. It may seem amazing that people are managing to engage in "whataboutism" regarding a virus, but such is the world.

The article's basic argument collapses when you take a brief look at the facts. First of all, the H1N1 outbreak started in the state of Veracruz, in Mexico, and not in the United States. From Mexico it quickly spread to the US, and then became a global pandemic. There was never a sense at any time that the virus was an "American" phenomenon, while the coronavirus cases are clearly concentrated in China for the time being (although this may well change). There was never any reason whatsoever to be wary of people coming from the United States, or to be scared of going there. The two situations are simply not comparable.

Of course, the author is right that other countries closing their borders with China or rejecting any visitors who have been there is overblown (but it is by no means only "Western" countries that are doing this. Russia and Mongolia closed their land borders with China quite fast). He is even more right when it comes to people refusing to eat in Chinese restaurants for fear of catching the virus, or shunning Chinese-looking people on the street. This is nothing but ignorance and racism, and unfortunately it is occurring all over Europe and elsewhere.

But when it comes to hypocrisy and double standards, it is instructive to take a look at how Mexicans were treated in China during the initial phases of the H1N1 outbreak, when the virus was still associated with Mexico. Jorge Guajardo, Mexico's ambassador to China at the time, has just written a pretty believable account according to which China suddenly stopped issuing visas to Mexicans, and Mexicans in China were quarantined regardless of whether they showed symptoms, not always in good conditions. It seems that when it comes to taking extreme measures against foreigners who might carry an infection, the Chinese authorities are second to none. And let's not even get started on the manhunt against people from Hubei which has been seen in some parts of China.

The article praises, predictably, China's "model response" to the viral outbreak, with its "broad and aggressive domestic response" combined with "the voluntary dutiful cooperation of its citizens". The delay in reporting the new illness is blamed entirely on "a few local government officials in Wuhan". It should be noted that authorities in Mexico, the country in which the H1N1 outbreak actually started, did respond by closing down public and private facilities in Mexico City, to no apparent effect. It may well be that in China such measures can be instituted more effectively and completely. The question is whether the extreme lockdown currently in place in much of China, which is taking a huge economic toll and threatening the livelihood of the poor, and which is even costing lives, is really useful or worthwhile. This is a question that deserves some serious discussion. I am not an epidemiologist, and cannot judge how dangerous this virus could become, nor how effective these measures can really be at stopping its spread. It may even be true that China is taking a hit for the good of us all, but I wouldn't be so quick to make this judgement. And I am pretty sure the author of the piece has no more qualification than I do in this regard.

The author of the LinkedIn article turns out to be an American commentator who has lived in China for two decades. As he says towards the end, "I am truly blessed with my lovely Chinese wife and our family living here in Shenyang, in China's Northeast. You get my meaning?". He has written a couple of books. The subtitle to one of them reads "Compared to divisive western societies, middle class life in China is like Disneyland; happy, stable & safe, better than ever for 600 million people." It would seem that he is a "China expert" along the lines of Martin Jacques and John Ross, who is now having his moment in the spotlight thanks to this well-timed bit of sophistry. 

Why won't foreign tourists come to China?

It seems that a few people high up in the Chinese hierarchy are finally starting to realise that, when a country operates on a parallel system to the rest of the world and does nothing to accommodate foreign visitors, there are costs.

In a post last year, I talked about the large gap between the number of foreign tourists that visit China and the number of Chinese that holiday abroad, and how this is hurting the country's capital account balance. The figures for 2017, which I provided in my post, were 130 million trips abroad made by Chinese citizens, as opposed to only 30 million trips to China made by foreigners. It appears that in 2018 the gap got even wider, with 30 million trips to China against 150 million trips abroad by the Chinese. These figures for inbound tourism are seriously unimpressive, with even far smaller countries like Thailand or Turkey managing to attract more visitors over the course of a year.

According to a report by Sixth Tone, based on previous reports in the Chinese-language press, it seems that a real effort is now being made to address this deficit. In August the Chinese government published a set of proposals to encourage inbound tourism (although they don't appear to address any of the real issues, talking only about "developing new tourist routes, performances and local products to attract visitors"). Then last week Shanghai brought a bunch of foreign experts on tourism together at the China International Import Expo, and announced a number of projects designed to attract foreign visitors.

Most importantly, earlier this month Ant Financial and Tencent announced in quick succession that it has now become possible to link foreign credit cards to Alipay and WeChat. Alipay is rolling out a system geared specifically to foreign travellers, who will be able to use it for a 90-day period. In principle this would go some way towards solving one of the biggest difficulties that short-term visitors face in China, in other words the impossibility to pay via mobile phone, in a country where using cash is now probably rarer than it was at the peak of Maoism.

If this could finally happen, it is only because the People's Bank of China took the step of allowing the two companies to open up to foreign bank accounts, abandoning concerns about money laundering and cross-border cash flows. Leaving aside the fact that Alipay's new feature for foreign users doesn't seem to be working all that well, this suggests that an effort is being made all the way at the top to start making China a bit more convenient for foreigners to navigate.

Some of the reasons for this shift aren't hard to see: James Liang, the co-founder and chairman of Ctrip, who has long been calling on the government to make China more open to foreign visitors, claimed at a conference in May that the deficit between inbound and outbound tourism is costing China a figure equal to 1.7% of its huge GDP. At a time when economic growth is at the lowest point in decades, and the trade war with the US is causing much damage, this state of affairs is obviously becoming a problem. Since restricting foreign travel for ordinary Chinese remains politically impractical, there is no alternative but to try and make the country a little bit more inviting for outsiders.

At the end of October the Ctrip chairman, who seems to have made this his mission, gave a talk at the "World Culture and Tourism Conference 2019" in Xi'an which was summarized in a popular WeChat post, entitled 携程梁建章：为什么外国游客不愿意来中国? (Ctrip's James Liang: why won't foreign tourists come to China?). The post has gained over 100,000 views, showing that this topic is finally gaining some traction. Mr. Liang claimed in the talk that while outbound tourism has been growing fast over the past decade, foreign tourism to China hasn't really grown at all. He pointed out that foreign tourism makes up 1-3% of GDP in most of the world's biggest economies, while in China's case it only accounts for 0.3%. In his estimate, China's tourist sector still has the potential to rake in an extra 1-200 billion dollars annually.

Mr. Liang then outlined the three main reasons why, in his view, foreign travellers are not coming to China. The three points he made are the difficulty of getting a Chinese visa, the inconvenience of not being able to access mobile payments, and the "cost of internet controls". The last point is eye-catching, because it is rarely made in public in China: the Ctrip chairman pointed out that the blocking of foreign websites (which he euphemistically referred to as "foreigners not being able to access their own country's internet after reaching China") makes it hard for Chinese travel destinations and businesses to promote themselves abroad, while also making it hard for foreign travellers to share their experience of China on social media.

As the WeChat post's author adds: "foreign travellers make an effort to get here, and then you don't even let them post in their "Moments". That's not beneficial for the reputation of China's travel industry" ("Moments" is where you post photos in WeChat). The article then suggests lifting the restrictions on the internet for foreign travellers, which seems unlikely to happen any time soon.

In any case, it may well be that a shift in thinking is indeed happening, and that the leadership is waking up to the fact that the lack of foreign visitors is an economic issue. It is even possible that more measures are on the way. But whether these efforts to attract more tourists will lead to anything is an open question.

Making mobile payments easier is certainly an important step, but I suspect the biggest issue remains the difficulty and trouble in obtaining tourist visas, especially considering that citizens of developed countries no longer need visas at all to enter most of China's neighbouring countries. If the government really wanted to attract more foreign tourists, this would be a good place to start. Then there is the mind-boggling fact that a large proportion, perhaps even a majority, of hotels around China will not accept guests with foreign passports. This is seriously inconvenient for the independent traveller, not to mention unnecessary and unfair. Changing this state of affairs should not be all that difficult.

The larger point is that, beyond a certain level, isolationism has real economic costs. Over the last decade the general trend has been for China to become more closed towards foreigners, whether long-term residents or visitors, in step with the tightening of restrictions and ideological controls and the creation of a local internet that runs separately from the rest of the world. Meanwhile, the great firewall has become higher and harder to get around than ever before. Apart from tourism, there are certainly many other ways in which this is constricting economic growth and dynamism. It will be interesting to see if the pressure brought on by the trade war and the economic downturn may actually exert a push in the other direction, towards greater openness and global integration.

Good work, Netease! An honest discussion of Chinese attitudes towards black people

Guangzhou's African community, probably the most striking case of foreign immigration to China, is apparently getting smaller and smaller. Over the last few months, articles have appeared in the Huffington Post, Quartz and CNN claiming that there has been something of an exodus of Africans from Guangzhou and from China in general. Part of the reason would seem to be economic: most of the Africans in Guangzhou are small-time traders buying up cheap goods and exporting them to their own country, but China's economic growth is slowing down, and African consumers are becoming better at distinguishing fakes from original products. There is also currently a shortage of dollars in West Africa, which is a problem because these traders cannot use their local currencies to trade in China.

Another part of the explanation seems to be connected with the increasing strictness of the authorities towards foreigners breaking visa regulations in China, something which is affecting both African traders as well as English teachers. Some of the Africans in Guangzhou do indeed overstay their visas, often because they are itinerant traders who are given 30-day tourist visas at a time and find that they are unable to finish their business in such a short time or don't even have the money to fly home. There are however also Africans who have lived stably in the city for years and have proper work visas. What all the reports agree on is that many of the city's Africans complain about the impossibility of acquiring some kind of permanent residence right, and about a general climate of racism and hostility towards them.

That there is a certain dislike of black people among many Chinese is a well-known fact to those familiar with the country. It is however extremely rare to hear such things openly admitted or discussed in the Chinese media. When it comes to racism, official slogans like "racism doesn't exist in China" and "Chinese people are very friendly towards foreigners" are what you will usually hear both in public discourse and on the streets. That is why I was quite surprised, in a good way, to see an article entitled "Why do the Chinese self-righteously discriminate against black people?" appear in Wangyi (Netease), one of China's major internet portals. It should be noted that Netease is one of the most liberal and open-minded of the country's major media providers (of course this is very relative).

The article touches upon all of the problems that black people might encounter in China. For instance, there is an interview with a black American who teaches English in Beijing. He claims that his school was happy with his performance, but his boss still told him that they were forced to look for someone else, because "the students would like a different teacher". During the breaks, he said he would hear students say in Chinese "I spent such a lot of money, and I'd really like a white teacher", or "I really don't want to stare at his black face the whole evening".

The article then goes on: "Saying that in China there is no discrimination against black people means deceiving ourselves and others (自欺欺人). Any ordinary Chinese can imagine the hard-to-conceal sense of foreboding and dread they would feel if they saw a black person walking towards them. Even though historically China has not engaged in the kind of large-scale, organized discrimination that Europe and America did, and there haven't been any policies of separation aimed at black people, racial thinking has long embedded itself in the heart of the ordinary Chinese. These sayings that we often like to use, like "descendants of the dragon" and "descendants of the fiery emperor and the yellow emperor", are actually a kind of racial thinking which show how we uphold the concept of blood lineage." The sayings mentioned (龙的传人 and 炎黄子孙 in Chinese) are often-used ways to refer to the Chinese people. It is really quite rare for an article in the Chinese media to attack the roots of Chinese thinking about nation and race in this way.

Later on the article describes the anti-African protests of 1988-89 at Nanjing University, something else which I am relatively surprised to even see mentioned. Finally, it touches upon the African community in Guangzhou. It says that even though Africans in Guangzhou have their own "Little Africa", "in China they are still a group that is seen in a poor light, rarely mentioned and even studiously avoided". It also quotes an African trader who married a Chinese woman and found that even his wife was constantly telling their children bad things about Africa. Finally, the controversy over the Chinese "Star Wars" poster that relegates the leading black actor to the a supporting cast position is analyzed.

All in all, I am quite impressed at the honesty and self-reflection displayed in the piece, in a country where racial issues of this kind are rarely acknowledged. Hopefully articles like this might help to improve attitudes. Keep up the good work, Netease!

African woman and baby on the streets of Guangzhou

Why are there so many English teachers in China on the wrong visa?

Over the last few days, China's expat magazines and websites have been reporting the news that a large number of foreign English teachers have been detained for working without a Z (work) visa, or in some cases for using fake diplomas to obtain their visas. They will certainly be fined and may be deported. Although it is hard to separate facts from hearsay, it seems that Chinese police officers are being offered a reward of 2000 Yuan for every foreign teacher without the right visa they can bust.

Due to this incentive they have become very determined, and apparently have gone to the lengths of posting fake adverts for high-paying English teaching jobs on websites used by expats. They will then arrest people who present themselves to the interview if they don't have a Z visa (I don't really understand how it can be a crime to just go to a job interview, but anyway). They have also threatened the foreign teachers detained with 30 days in jail if they don't turn over all their phone contacts, some of whom will then supposedly be the victims of more checks.

When I first came to China, the general situation was that nobody really seemed to care what visa foreigners worked on. It was common for foreign students to round up their meagre scholarship allowances by teaching English part-time in schools. Although it is theoretically illegal for a foreigner to work and earn money on a student visa or anything other than a Z visa, in actuality nobody was bothered. Teachers working full-time on a business visas or even tourist visas were also quite common, and again it was very rare for anything bad to happen. As long as a foreigner didn't actually overstay their visa, nobody really seemed to mind if it didn't match their occupation.

There have of course been moments in the past when the authorities became stricter with foreigners. I have been in China long enough to remember the 2012 crackdown on foreigners "entering illegally, staying illegally and working illegally". I was never actually affected myself, but stories abounded of police randomly stopping foreigners on the street and demanding to see their passports, or raiding language schools and checking whether all the foreigners present had work visas. Although I was not yet in China at the time, the crackdown just before the Olympic games in 2008 is supposed to have been quite bad, with foreigners who had worked in China for years suddenly being refused visas and raids on bars where foreigners liked to gather.

The truth though is that those crackdown were only temporary, and in 2012 things were back to normal after about two or three months of the campaign beginning. The whole campaign gave me the feeling of being more of a show than a serious attempt to weed out foreigners working illegally, although of course I stand to be corrected about this. Nowadays however what we appear to be seeing is a serious, sustained attempt to kick out any foreigners who work here on the wrong visa. If police officers are being offered bonuses to catch illegal foreigners, then someone is pretty determined to make this happen.

Of course, it could be argued that the Chinese authorities have a perfect right to ensure that their visa regulations are respected. If you need a Z visa to work, then you should get a Z visa, right? As always however, things are not that simple and can be seen from a variety of angles. China is not a country where rules are clearcut and always followed. Rather, it is a country where rules are often unclear, selectively applied and ignored when it is considered convenient. This flexibility allows the authorities to get things done quickly and efficiently when they want to, but it also means that few people are ever completely clean and unassailable. Depending on how strict they decide to be, the government can pretty much choose to crackdown on anyone and anything they like.

There are a number of factors pushing foreigners to teach on the wrong visas in China. For one thing, Z visas are very hard to obtain, and only getting harder. Applicants need to have at least an undergraduate university degree, and they have to get hold of a criminal record certificate from their own country's police, an official letter by an employer proving two years of full-time work experience after graduation, translate all of the required documents into Chinese, and finally apply at their own country's Chinese embassy (it cannot be in a third country).

On the other hand, the demand for foreign English teachers in China is extremely high. Parents in cities all over the country are ready to fork out quite a bit of cash to have their children taught by a "native" English teacher (native very often meaning "white" in their minds). Often the employment of foreign English teachers is handled by third-party agencies that rent them out to schools. Given the difficulty and high costs associated with getting a work visa, agencies and schools have every incentive to hire foreigners who are in China on a business or student visa, and try and convince them that there is no risk involved.

What's more, there have been cases of agencies faking university diplomas for foreigners without a bachelor's degree so that they would be given a work visa. This is another thing which is being cracked down upon. There are also restrictions on the number of foreigners which Chinese companies can legally hire. Although I am not sure how this is applied to language schools, it may mean that schools cannot legally get work visas for as many foreign teachers as they would like.

There is thus a vast English teaching industry in which all players have an interest in cheating. The small army of foreign English teachers is also a most diverse one. The unfortunate stereotype of the Western reprobate who comes to China to teach English because they have nothing going for them back home or to get away from personal problems is probably true for some people, but certainly not in the majority of cases. There are the young Brits and Americans who do it a few years for the adventure. But there are also plenty of people coming from countries like Pakistan, the Philippines and South Africa teaching English in China, probably attracted by the relatively good money you can make.

I have also met people from countries like Ukraine and Russia, hardly famous for their English fluency, teaching English here. Years ago I met a Polish couple teaching English in a small town near Chongqing. They had passable English, and their agency had told them to introduce themselves to their high schools students as Jack and Martha, from England. As far as I know nobody doubted them. But while it is true that some foreign teachers may not speak English quite as well as advertised or may not be the best educators, there are certainly also employers that act dishonestly towards them. This is a field where standards are generally low on all sides.

Essentially, for years this hugely profitable industry was kept going on the understanding that nobody would care if foreigners worked in China without the appropriate visa. Now, however, the authorities have started to care. Of course China's vast size and chaotic development means that different people can have very different experiences. I am sure there are still plenty of foreigners teaching on the wrong visas, or places where the authorities have not started to make a fuss. Essentially, though, the trend is towards greater controls and strictness.

Basically what I see is a contrast between the demand for English language training in China and the sums parents are ready to spend on it, which remain vast, and the current tendency towards more control in all fields and stricter application processes and checks for foreigners who want to work China. If nothing else, when teaching English on the wrong visa becomes so risky it isn't worthwhile, legitimate and certified foreign teachers with the right visa might actually find themselves in better demand and able to earn more for their efforts.

Why are foreigners leaving China?

It is a fact: over the last few years, there have been more foreigners moving out of China than moving in.

The exodus of foreigners has been especially pronounced in Beijing, and even the Chinese media has reported on this (here's an English translation, and here's the original). But the situation is essentially the same all over the country: foreigners are leaving in larger numbers than they are arriving. A new study by a company which helps relocate expats has confirmed this trend, claiming that in 2014 twice as many expats left China than those who arrived.

Most of the articles covering this phenomenon, including the Wall Street Journal one linked above, note a few specific reasons behind the trend. First of all there is the dreadful air pollution, which has only worsened in the last few years, and is scaring people off. This factor looms especially big in the case of Beijing, where the air quality is way worse then it is in Southern cities like Shanghai and Shenzhen (where it's still pretty bad, by the way). Then there is the slowdown in China's economic growth and the rising productions costs, which may be pushing some multinational companies to relocate elsewhere in Asia. Finally there is the rising cost of living in China's big cities.

All of these factors seem perfectly plausible to me. Living in Beijing, I personally know people who have left due to the pollution. Costs of living have risen, especially if you want to maintain a decent lifestyle: you have to pay for expensive air purifiers to keep your flat breathable, you have to shop for imported food if you want to be certain of its safety, you have to take taxis rather than the subway in order to avoid being driven crazy by the crowds etc... Rents in the major cities are now almost as expensive as they would be in Western Europe, and healthcare at international standards costs a bomb.

I am surprised that none of the articles on the exodus of foreigners mention another obvious annoyance of life in China: the censorship of foreign websites, which has become more and more extensive over the last few years. Even though there are ways to get around the firewall (but it's getting harder), it still complicates the lives of foreign expats and serves as a constant reminder of the sort of system they are living under.

This leads me to another factor which looms big, although it isn't usually mentioned in a direct fashion: there is a distinct feeling that China is no longer as welcoming as it used to be for foreigners. This begins at the institutional level. It has become harder and harder for foreigners to receive Chinese work visas over the last few years. This is partly a matter of the rules themselves becoming tougher, and partly a result of the pre-existing rules being applied more strictly (in China one always has to look at how the rules are applied, and not just at what they say on paper).

Both international and Chinese companies are now more likely to try and recruit local talent for positions for which they previously recruited expatriates. This is partly due to the large numbers of Chinese who have returned from studying abroad and are assumed to have a good grasp of international business culture. But it is also due to how difficult it has been made to recruit foreigners. Chinese companies especially are only allowed to employ foreigners under very specific conditions which are hard to meet. And while in the past it was fairly tolerated for foreigners to work on a business or even a tourist visa, the authorities have now become stricter on this front too.

The truth is that those in power have never viewed a multicultural society or the integration of foreign immigrants as desirable goals. The presence of foreign nationals working in China is seen more as something to be tolerated if it helps the country develop. Foreigners are in China to the extent that they are needed, but they do not acquire any kind of stake in the society. If there are Chinese who are capable of doing the same jobs, then it is preferred that Chinese do them. Of course attracting talented immigrants would appear to be a hallmark of most successful modern countries, at least in the West, but as far as the current Chinese government is concerned the benefits just do not outweigh the hassle of integrating all those un-harmonious foreigners.

Receiving a permanent residence permit is extremely arduous for a foreign national, and receiving Chinese citizenship practically impossible (and not too desirable, especially since you would have to give up your own citizenship in the process). No matter what you do in China, you will eventually be confronted with the fact that you have no permanent basis to reside in the country. Visas have to be renewed at least once a year, and if you want to change occupations you will have to consider what your chances are of getting a new visa in time. Constant "visa runs" to Hong Kong are obviously not a safe and long-term solution (then again, Shanghai has just announced new rules making it easier for foreigners to get permanent residence permits. What this will mean in practice remains to be seen).

I also think that the worsening political climate is playing its part. In the old days (say the first decade of the 21st century), there was a distinct feeling among foreign residents that China was on a path towards becoming a more open and liberal kind of country, slowly but surely. With this belief in mind, people could tolerate a lot. Nowadays that feeling has basically gone, at least among those who take an interest in Chinese affairs. The current atmosphere of repression (which has caught even the odd foreigner in its net) and the mounting populistic nationalism are not exactly encouraging people to remain in the country.

All of these factors, I am convinced, are pushing people to seek their fortunes elsewhere. In the long run, the loss will mostly be China's. 

Five great China expat memoirs

Many foreigners who have spent time in China feel compelled to write a memoir about their experiences in this big, mysterious country. Unfortunately many of these books turn out not to be especially entertaining or interesting. Just because you've lived in China, it doesn't mean you have either good writing skills or anything insightful to say about the place. Every now and again though, a book comes out which really manages to capture the essence of the foreign experience in China. Here are a few of the best ones I have read so far.

River Town, by Peter Hessler

This classic remains the standard for the "foreigner in China" genre. In 1997 young American literature graduate Peter Hessler ends up on a two year stint teaching english in Fuling, a small town near Chongqing, in the proverbial middle of nowhere. New to China and not knowing a word of Chinese, he has to figure everything out for himself. His book is a superbly crafted description of his experiences, and what he comes to understand about China and his own culture in the process.

The book doesn't gloss over some of the less savoury aspects of the society which Hessler finds himself immersed in, but he always does his best to find poetry and beauty where he can. Hessler's students, young adults from the Sichuanese countryside training to be teachers, really come alive in his description. The challenges and the fun of teaching English literature in the middle of China are also described quite vividly.

After writing this book Hessler moved to Beijing, where he wrote another two books about China and became well known for his ability to describe the country to American audiences. He has now moved to Cairo, where he is trying to learn Arabic and write about the Middle East.

Mr. China, by Tim Clissold

A memoir by Tim Clissold, an englishman who set up shop in Beijing in the early nineties as a young, starry-eyed businessman with dreams of making it big in China's new market economy.

After a year of studying Chinese in Beijing, Tim was hired by a Wall Street banker referred to only as "Pat" (in actuality Jack Perkowski), who needed someone to oversee how the millions of dollars he was pouring into Chinese factories were being put to use. Inevitably all sorts of unforseen problems arose, from factory bosses escaping to Las Vegas with 58 million in cash, to other bosses transferring land to rival factories personally owned by their associates. Tim had to run around China from one end to the other, trying to deal with all the mishaps and explain them to incomprehending American investors.

The book is certainly entertaining, and does its best to be culturally sensitive. At the same time, it reads a bit like an expose' of the kind of business ventures which unprepared, amateurish Westerners would throw themselves into in the China of the nineties. Apparently Jack Perkowski now blames Tim Clissold for many of the problems the book describes, and has refused to read it. Perhaps he should have thought it through before hiring a clueless young man with one year's experience in China to oversee 418,000,000 dollars in investment？

The Forbidden Door (La Porta Proibita), by Tiziano Terzani

Tiziano Terzani was an Italian writer, journalist and adventurer who spent decades living all across Asia. He was well known in Italy for his deep knowledge of Asian languages and cultures, and for his fascinating travel books.

Terzani and his wife eating with some Chinese friends

Terzani was fluent in Chinese, a language he learnt in Stanford in the late sixties, and always curious about China. As soon as the country opened up slightly to the outside world in the early eighties, he moved to Beijing as a correspondent for a German magazine. Terzani arrived in the Chinese capital in 1980, when foreigners where still extremely rare. He immediately did his best to integrate and learn about his new home, refusing to remain confined within the diplomatic compound where foreigners were forced to live at the time. He rode a bike, sent his children to a local school (which they hated), travelled around the country hard class, and got to know as many people as possible. In the end the authorities got fed up with this man who just wouldn't stick to the script; in 1984, Terzani was arrested on the fabricated accusation of smuggling artistic treasures out of the country, "re-educated" for a month (which mainly consisted in him having to write nonsense confessions), and then kicked out of China.

The book he wrote on his years in China (called La porta Proibita in Italian) is a fascinating portrayal of the country in the early eighties: in some ways so different from now, and in some ways exactly the same. It also offers something different from the Anglo-Saxon perspective of many foreign authors who have written about China. Although Terzani was enthralled by Maoism as a young man, he became highly critical of the Chinese system after moving there. At the same time he discovered the real, human side of China, which he found much more interesting and exciting than the faultless facade which the authorities attempted to show the outside world.

Unfortunately Terzani died of cancer in 2004, after spending his last few months in the hills of his native Tuscany. No other Italian has since written about China as insightfully as he did.

Foreign Babes in Beijing, by Rachel DeWoskin

Rachel DeWoskin, the daughter of an American Sinologist, arrived in Beijing in 1994, aged 23, to work in an American PR firm. Before long Rachel, who had no acting experience and shaky Chinese, was offered the starring part in a TV soap on a foreign lady who falls in love with a Chinese man. The show was hugely successful, gaining over 600 million viewers, and Rachel turned into a celebrity and a sex symbol overnight.

Her memoir is a sensitive, amusing description of her five years in the Chinese capital, during which Rachel delved into the city's emerging alternative arts and rock music scene and met all sorts of curious characters, while holding down a variety of jobs. China was an exciting and bewildering place to be at the time, and Rachel always did her best to keep an open mind on what she experienced.

The book is a great portrayal of what expat life was like in Beijing in the nineties, a time when you could receive an offer to appear on TV just for having a foreign face and being able to put three words of Chinese together, everyone was curious about Westerners and their culture, foreigners were only allowed to live in certain neighbourhoods but would happily flout the law, and the traffic and pollution were still at bearable levels.

Why China will Never Rule the World, by Troy Parfitt

After a decade spent living in Taiwan as an anonymous English teacher, Canadian Troy Parfitt got fed up with hearing supposed experts back in the West go on about how China was going to become the next superpower and a dominant influence throughout the world. This just didn't chime with his experience. So armed with his ability to speak Chinese and his first-hand knowledge of Chinese culture, Parfitt decided to embark on a long journey through Mainland China and Taiwan, and craft it into a travelogue with an agenda.

The first part is a bitter and sometimes hilarious description of his travels through the Mainland, which are replete with the sort of of misadventures any old China-hand will be familiar with: revolting restrooms, rude, unresponsive or just plain idiotic staff, dismal accommodation, tacky "ancient ruins" rebuilt 20 years ago, scams and touts etc.... Parfitt finds almost nothing to like in China, and he is not afraid to say it like he sees it. His descriptions of his travels are replete with historical and cultural digressions, during which he dismisses Chinese culture and all it stands for. In the end, Parfitt concludes that China is condemned to remain authoritarian forever, and has no hope of gaining any kind of real global influence any time soon. Although he has no love for China's current rulers, he sees the roots of the problem as lying even deeper, in Confucianism and the country's basic cultural identity.

In the second part of the book, Parfitt tours his adopted homeland of Taiwan, and meanwhile tells us his impressions of Taiwanese society which he gained from his years of living there. He describes Taiwan as being a better place than the Mainland in almost every way, but he still finds Taiwanese society to be lacking in many important respects, and he blames Chinese culture and education for the lack of critical thinking, ignorance and obtuseness which he perceives all around him.

Obviously Parfitt's conclusions are highly provocative and debatable, and not everything he claims about China is true. It is not true, for instance, that you never see people exercise outdoors (has he ever been to a Chinese park?). I don't find it to be the case that nobody ever knows the way to anywhere, a constant theme throughout the book. Parfitt's historical anecdotes are interesting and informative, but often biased, and dismissing the whole of Chinese history as nothing but war and chaos is highly simplistic. At the same time, I think anyone who knows China properly will find themselves secretly agreeing with him every once in a while.

If this book deserves to be read, it is mainly because it gives vent to some of the negative attitudes and frustration which many long-term foreign residents develop towards Chinese culture. At the end of the book Parfitt describes how he decided to move back to Canada, finally fed up with Taiwan and Chinese society as a whole. This was clearly a long overdue decision.

Foreigners who speak Chinese

For many years, Mark Henry Roswell (aka Dashan) played the role of the archetypal "Chinese-speaking foreigner" on Chinese television. Although his popularity has been on the wane in recent years, during the nineties and into the early 2000s Dashan was a star to hundreds of millions of Chinese, probably making him the most famous Canadian in the world, even though in his native Canada no one has even heard of him.

As much as Chinese audiences (used to) love him, foreigners who live in China long term and speak Chinese often claim that they can't stand him. Part of this may be put down to envy of Dashan's truly amazing mastery of the Chinese language. There is more to it then that though. As Peter Hessler commented in his great book "River Town", "many of Dashan's routines have more than a touch of the trained monkey to them".

That's a harsh way to put it, but not inaccurate. Dashan's route to fame has basically been to ape the Chinese, amazing people by performing xiangsheng and presenting shows with exactly the same intonations and mannerisms that a Chinese actor would use (as in the video below). The only thing that distinguishes him is his foreign face. One can almost imagine the Chinese audiences going "oh look, the cute little alien can perform xiangsheng just like a Chinese can".

Dashan recently gave a very long and reasoned reply to the question of why a lot of foreign Chinese learners seem to hate him, showing admirable self-awareness. He claims that the perception of him as a "performing monkey" responds to a Western cultural bias, and has nothing to do with how Chinese audiences actually perceive him. He also claims that in China people simply won't accept a foreign celebrity criticizing any aspect of the country on television.

He is probably right, but I think it is still fair to say that Dashan has never used his fame to do anything which could really bridge the two cultures, or lead Chinese audiences to question their assumptions about Western culture. Of course there are huge constraints to what you can talk about on Chinese television, but I think there would still have been ways to push boundaries a little, and encourage audiences to see the world from a different perspective.

Nowadays however, the internet is offering new opportunities for Westerners with good Chinese to achieve some degree of fame in Chinese society while actually saying something of substance in the process. One of them is a German who goes by the Chinese name of Lei Ke (雷克).

Lei Ke became famous in 2007, when he traveled all the way from Beijing to Urumqi, in China's Far West, and then wrote a book about it in Chinese. He also gave quite a lot of interviews on Chinese television. At the time he had a big beard and long messy hair, which must have made him look quite outlandish to all the Chinese villagers he met on the way.

His Chinese is not quite at Dashan's level, to be sure, but he still speaks it fluently and confidently. Now back in Germany, he regularly releases videos online of himself commenting on Chinese society and current affairs in Chinese. Some of these videos have been making the rounds on Wechat and Chinese websites. What is noticeable is that he has absolutely no qualms about saying it like he sees it, and criticizing the Chinese government in the process (of course he no longer lives in China).

Below is a video he released after his popular Weibo account was closed down by the website. He attacks Weibo for censoring people's posts, and claims that the Chinese government must be very happy that everyone now prefers to use Wechat, where only your friends can see what you post, and the kind of public debate which flourished on Weibo is thus impossible. Unfortunately there are no English subtitles.

Recently an American girl studying in Taiwan, named Avalon, released a video on YouTube where she explains in fluent Chinese (this time with English subs) why this video by Taiwanese pop group 911 is racist and tasteless. The kind of stereotypes about foreigners which underlie the song, and the complete insensitivity to the fact that "blacking up" is offensive, are quite recognizable to anyone who has lived in an East Asian country.

The American girl's video drew a lot of attention in Taiwan, and pushed the band to release a statement in which they denied that they were being racist, although they still show no understanding of why the song and the video might be perceived as offensive. They also released a statement on their Facebook page in which they heavily insulted the American girl in Taiwanese. Others however took her side.