Yang says he wants to “enhance China’s prestige in the world …. He speaks in a gentle, friendly manner — in the precise English he learned as a student in Great Britain. Here too, outside the studio, he remains the consummate gentleman, never rising into the shrill tones favored by many a government spokesperson.

On his Weibo account on Wednesday, Yang showed a different side [zh]. Josh Chin’s translation at The Wall Street Journal reads:

The Public Security Bureau wants to clean out the foreign trash: To arrest foreign thugs and protect innocent girls, they need to concentrate on the disaster zones in [student district] Wudaokou and [drinking district] Sanlitun. Cut off the foreign snake heads. People who can’t find jobs in the U.S. and Europe come to China to grab our money, engage in human trafficking and spread deceitful lies to encourage emigration. Foreign spies seek out Chinese girls to mask their espionage and pretend to be tourists while compiling maps and GPS data for Japan, Korea and the West. We kicked out that foreign bitch and closed Al-Jazeera’s Beijing bureau. We should shut up those who demonize China and send them packing.

The post met with criticism and ridicule from many Sina Weibo users. Charles Custer gathered and translated some responses at ChinaGeeks:

Host Yang, you haven’t gone far enough! We should bring back all the officials’ wives and children from overseas to help build the motherland, we must not allow them to be polluted by foreign trash, yes, and also we should close the borders/forbid international travel, so that there is no contact with overseas forces.

Isn’t your daughter studying in the US?

The fact that this CCTV host isn’t writing editorials for the Beijing Daily is truly a waste of talent.

This is exactly how the Boxer Rebellion started…

Even the state-owned English-language tabloid Global Times paired its translation of Yang’s outburst with some dissenting comments:

@天下乐田: Can we stop this way of governing the country? Public policies come in waves of public campaign and (the effect of which does not last long). How far can it get us to demonize every foreign citizen here who does not have legal residence status? After all, the bad is only a few; the majority of the criminals in the country are Chinese. The point is how to work on efficiency and effectiveness in the public service domain.

@平安08: Should the presenter be more analytical he would realize the we now live in a global village. State border allows for two-way traffic. If others treated the Chinese community with such intense belligerence, it wouldn’t be too good for us. To work hard to make our society a better place starts with us!

Many have wondered whether Yang will now struggle to find foreign guests to appear on his show, with some urging an active boycott. Custer and others went further, quickly putting together a bilingual flyer to be distributed on weibo, calling for Yang’s firing. In response, Yang insisted that he stood against xenophobia, and had been referring only to a small minority of “foreign hooligans” [zh]; but that given his reaction, perhaps Custer was one of them, and his background should be investigated by the Public Security Bureau. “What kind of journalist sets police on to critics?” wondered The Guardian’s Jonathan Watts.

As Custer noted at China Geeks, Yang’s post fits a wider trend:

Yang’s comments come at a particularly sensitive time for foreigners, many of whom are concerned about their safety after a British scumbag and a Russian idiot have stirred up a lot of nationalist, anti-foreign sentiment online (all foreigners are the same, so we’re all guilty by association). Probably related is the crackdown on illegal foreigners in Beijing that Yang was commenting on. This crackdown is perfectly fair in theory — every country has immigration laws and the right to enforce them — but the language and imagery that’s being used to promote it is sort of concerning, as is the idea that foreigners will now be required to carry their papers at all times and submit to random checks. Suddenly, Beijing is feeling a bit like Arizona (that’s not a good thing).

Beijing’s campaign against illegal foreign residents has indeed taken what many feel is an alarming tone. Its “cleaning up” rhetoric has been widely embraced, while a group of web companies including Sina and Baidu is encouraging users to report and publicise bad behaviour by foreigners, whether their papers are in order or not. Relatively trivial incidents risk being blown out of proportion: the verbal abuse flung at a female Chinese train passenger by Russian cellist Oleg Vedernikov was certainly obnoxious, but might ordinarily not have dominated the front page of the Beijing Morning Post. The apparent wave of anti-foreign sentiment, and various parties’ vigorous stoking of it, has fed suspicions of ulterior motives. From Global Post:

Some suspect that the policy is intended to whip up xenophobia to cement the Party’s control after an unprecedented series of snafus embarrassed China on the international stage. Years of carefully sculpting Beijing’s image flew out the window when Chen Guangcheng, the blind legal-rights activist, and Wang Lijun, an iron-fisted police chief, each fled to the US embassy for protection from their own government.

And with the Party preparing for its transfer of power this autumn, the crackdown may be intended to serve as a way to unite popular support.

“By deputizing the populists against the foreigners, it’s a way for the authorities to say we’re all in this together — the government and the people — against the illegal aliens,” says Jeremiah Jenne, a PhD candidate at the University of California-Davis, who has lived in Beijing since 2002.

© Samuel Wade for China Digital Times (CDT), 2012. | Permalink | 3 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: CCTV, immigration, immigration law, racism, sina weibo, soft power, television, xenophobia
Download Tools to Circumvent the Great Firewall

Popular Beijing spots for foreigners, such as Sanlitun and university areas, will be targeted by police in a fresh drive against visitors who commit crimes, outstay their visas or gain illegal employment, authorities said on Monday ….

Foreigners must carry passports and accommodation registration documents at all times in line with Chinese regulations. “We will enforce the rule and make sure that every foreigner knows that,” Lin told China Daily ….

The capital has reported 13,000 cases of illegal entry, overstaying and illegal employment concerning foreigners from more than one hundred countries since 2008, according to exit-entry statistics.

Citizens have been invited to help by tipping off police at a special phone hotline, with a dramatic “striking fist” graphic urging them on. Proper enforcement of immigration rules in itself is uncontroversial and perhaps, as Bill Bishop wrote at Sinocism, “long overdue”. But the vehemence of online approval has startled some observers. While Danwei’s Jeremy Goldkorn told The Wall Street Journal that “the online reaction is a little scary … but I don’t think this necessarily reflects any general rise in anti-foreigner sentiment,” Tea Leaf Nation’s survey of responses from Sina Weibo paints an unsettling picture:

The overall tone of discussion will surely be deeply troubling to anyone who has ever had to be an “outsider.” @魚魚桑 honed in on, and lauded, the dangerous semantics employed by Beijing police: “‘Clean up’…This is really the right word to use. I feel like it’s cleaning up trash from the street.”

Others piled on, in many cases disregarding the original distinction between illegal foreigners and legal foreigners. @Bob_慕小落 wrote, “Clean slowly, so that not a single one is left.” But @味同烂嚼 wanted speed: “We should thoroughly clean up, hurry up and clean up, I don’t want to see these disgusting people anymore.” @山哥SANGER opined, “White-skinned pigs [白皮猪], black devils [黑鬼], sticks [棒子, a slur referring to Koreans], devils [鬼子], Southeast Asian monkeys [东南亚猴子] and other kinds of foreign trash should all be swept out the door ….”

While it would be comforting to conclude the vitriol spewed online represents a minority, if this is the case cooler heads have spent a great deal of time sitting sideline. One culprit behind such anti-foreigner sentiment is the sense that foreigners have been given special treatment for too long. As @Ren类已经无法阻止我了 asked ironically, “Has Beijing begun to pay attention to we second-class citizens?” @Mantarine agreed, “Chinese have been too tolerant of foreigners … some foreigners’ conduct has really been over the top.”

Ministry of Tofu collected and translated some more weibo reactions, including Goldkorn’s:

Jeremy Goldkorn (South African, founder of Danwei.org): I am officially, seriously and sincerely a three-have laowai. Visa, residence permit, and work permit, I have them all. I am also a three-no laowai: I am no rapist, no fraud, and I steal no job from Chinese. Nevertheless, there are surely people who call me “foreign trash” or whatever.

刘仰: In the future, there will just be more and more foreign losers, who fare poorly in their countries and want to come to China to muddle along for food, drink and women. Because some Chinese are cheap and turn China into a paradise for foreign losers. Of course, another possibility cannot be rooted out, which is, some foreign losers are not really losers; they just act like one to disguiser their real identity and are up to something. So, a clean-up is necessary.

痞痞兔: Should also clean up those “foreign nationals’ fathers” (alluding to Chinese cadres whose children are naturalized foreign citizens) who engage in illegal activities in China. Many of those three-have foreign nationals’ fathers have a source of income (large-sum gray income), have fixed and regular abode (several houses), have a formal job (civil servants); some even stay in China for nothing but committing a crime (embezzling public funds and taking bribes).

Resentment of the “free pass” given to foreigners also surfaced, ironically, in chinaSMACK’s collection of responses to a BBC report on China’s growing global popularity:

腾讯网友 夜莺:

Just take a look at the whities getting VIP treatment in China and you’ll know, this problem is inevitable.

腾讯芜湖市网友 白开水:

Foreigners from developed nations enjoy privileged protection in China, or as they say foreigners are first class, officials are second class, minorities are third class and Han are fourth class. Here in China the exact same thing can happen to foreigners and Chinese but will have completely different outcomes, just like differing chemical reactions. It’s very simple, just look at how even big shot officials are ranked behind foreigners and you’ll know just how big the disparity is.

(See ‘Is China Squandering its Soft Power Investments?‘ for more on the BBC survey.)

The campaign comes amid a wave of what Harry Kazianis at The Diplomat describes as “old fashioned jingoism” from Chinese media over tensions with the Philippines in the South China Sea, possibly in an attempt to distract from political controversies at home.

Over the last several weeks, as Western media has followed the unfolding of events of Chen Guangcheng’s dash to the U.S. embassy in Beijing, which came on the heels of the Bo Xilai scandal, Chinese media has shifted its gaze elsewhere. In the South China Sea or West Philippine Sea, depending on which party you ask, tensions are being stoked in the form of provocative editorials, reporting, and the actions of Chinese journalists. Such reporting – nothing more than old fashioned jingoism – sets a dangerous precedent in an area of the world that is already rife with tensions. And, while such coverage is useful for turning the page on China’s internal political soap operas, fueling the fires of Chinese nationalism can only inject a dangerous element that, if left unchecked, could make it harder for either side to compromise ….

Social media is also ablaze with nationalistic and fire-spitting commentary. While Chinese censors are quick to repress any of the latest news or rumors concerning Bo or Chen, matters in the South China Sea seem like fair game. One microblogger named kongdehua declared, “the Philippines have basically been making irrational trouble, if they want to start a war then we will strike, no one fears them.” He went on to say in a widely quoted remark that, “If every Chinese spat once, we could drown (the Philippines).”

While authorities have denied that the campaign is linked to recent video of a British man sexually assaulting a Chinese woman, Josh Chin at China Real Time Report points to this as a turning point after a series of viral stories about foreign Good Samaritans.

The clean-up campaign arrives in the midst of a heated discussion among Chinese social media users about the way foreigners comport themselves in the country. Last week, the stories of two foreigners – one an American who bought French fries for a homeless woman in the city of Nanjing, the other a Brazilian man who was badly beaten by a trio of thieves after trying to stop a woman from having her bag pickpocketed in Dongguan – spread quickly online as Chinese Internet users engaged in a round of soul-searching over the belief that Good Samaritans in China are in relatively short supply.

A similar discussion took place late last year after a foreign tourist, 34-year-old Uruguayan Maria Fernanda, jumped into Hangzhou’s West Lake to save a drowning woman as dozens of Chinese onlookers stood idly by ….

But much of that goodwill has been erased in recent days thanks to the wide circulation online of a video that appears to show a foreigner caught in the middle of sexually assaulting a Chinese woman. In the video, uploaded on Wednesday and viewed more than 10 million times on Chinese video site Youku (warning: disturbing content), the foreigner is pulled away from the woman, scuffles briefly with a Chinese man and is later shown lying motionless in the street, where he is hit and kicked again before police arrive.

Netizens were also outraged recently by reports of a vicious and humiliating attack on two Chinese students on a Sydney train, which has left other Chinese residents deeply ill at ease. At the same time, and notwithstanding the findings of the BBC survey noted above, the attacks and references to the victims’ presumed wealth resonate with tensions between Chinese abroad and local populations elsewhere. In British Columbia, rich Chinese immigrants are widely (and unfairly) blamed for driving up property prices, while a group of Chinese students was stopped by police late last year for racing supercars on a public highway during rush hour. In Singapore on Saturday, a man from Sichuan and two others were killed after his Ferrari collided with a taxi. Shanghaiist’s Kenneth Tan describes the incident’s context and aftermath:

Anti-Chinese sentiment in Singapore is up following the accident, and outraged netizens have left thousands of angry comments on websites, bulletin boards and social networks.

The Temasek Times, a widely-read and largely anti-foreign news website, lambasted journalists from the mainstream media who “did not think nationality is an issue”.

Singapore’s population has exploded from 3.2 million in 2000 to 5.2 million in 2011, as the government ramped up its intake of immigrants. Mainland Chinese migrants have constituted a large part of newcomers due to lower fertility rates among the ethnic Chinese Singaporean community and the government’s belief that it is imperative to maintain the city-state’s current ethnic mix.

Mainland Chinese and other foreigners have been blamed for taking local jobs, depressing wages, pushing up real estate prices, and testing the limits of the public transportation network.

© Samuel Wade for China Digital Times (CDT), 2012. | Permalink | One comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: Beijing, foreign garbage, foreigners in Beijing, foreigners in China, immigration, philippines, racism, sina weibo, singapore, visa
Download Tools to Circumvent the Great Firewall

A translation from Xuan’s blog on the Chinese social media site Weibo reads: “I really wish all of this is just a nightmare. However, the smell of blood in my mouth and body pains reminds me that this city is so dangerous.

“A gang of hooligans attacked us. Our noses are fractured and our bodies are covered in blood. My friend’s cheekbone was crushed. They attacked us with glass and burnt us with lit cigarettes. My face is burnt and totally disfigured! Worst of all, I really hated their racist comments.

“They were calling us Asian dogs and pussies while they were beating us. When my friend tried to wipe blood from his nose, a teenaged girl stuffed my friend’s mouth with her tampon removed from her pants.”

Another woman passenger, who was also targeted by the thieves, allegedly told the attackers to “rob them, they are Asian and they have got money”.

The Herald reports that the online response has been one of “outrage” and “disgust” at the attack. In contrast, many reactions to the LA shootings expressed vitriol toward the victims, after it was prominently and falsely reported that they had been driving a $60,000 BMW.

© Samuel Wade for China Digital Times (CDT), 2012. | Permalink | 2 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: Australia, Kevin Rudd, racism, sina weibo, students abroad, Sydney, violence
Download Tools to Circumvent the Great Firewall

“I am deeply sorry for any pain that the character I portrayed brought to my communities. As a recent college grad who has spent time working to improve communities and empower those without a voice, this role is not in any way representative of who I am. It was absolutely a mistake on my part and one that, over time, I hope can be forgiven. I feel horrible about my participation and I am determined to resolve my actions.”

Politico also reported this week that the ad appeared to have damaged the Hoekstra campaign, based on a Public Policy Polling survey (PDF):

… 54 percent of voters in Michigan were aware of Hoekstra’s controversial ad and 45 percent said it made them less likely to vote for him, according to Public Policy Polling. Only 16 percent said that the spot made them more likely to vote for him, and 37 percent said it didn’t make a difference in their voting preferences.

Hoekstra is now 14 points behind incumbent Sen. Debbie Stabenow in head-to-head polling, 51 percent to 37 percent. In July, her lead was just nine points, and in PPP’s previous three polls, her lead had been an average of seven points.

Stabenow’s approval ratings have changed little over the past six months. In fact, the change in poll numbers appear to be driven by disapproval of Hoekstra, whose favorability has dropped by a net ten points since PPP’s last poll.

Hoekstra’s team dismissed the news, arguing that the poll was weighted in favour of Democrats. This would not completely explain changes relative to previous polls using the same model, however.

GOOD Design (via Adam Minter), meanwhile, explores the history and significance of the “chop suey” fonts used liberally on the ad’s accompanying website (now offline).

In an article for Print magazine, type expert Paul Shaw traces the origin of these Asian-inspired fonts. They began in 1883, when the Cleveland Type Foundry created a typeface called Chinese, which became known as Mandarin by the mid 1950s. The font became famous when it was used in a poster that promoted tourism to San Francisco’s Chinatown after the 1906 earthquake ….

But though chop suey fonts rose to popularity through entrepreneurial Chinese immigrants, they waned in the second half of the 20th century as graphic designers shook off the prejudice that dominated the discipline through the 1950s Modern era. Today, chop suey types are still contested by those who find them derogatory ….

Hoekstra’s use of chop suey fonts and other racially charged imagery shines a light on the stereotypes that still exist within every part of society, including the political and graphic design worlds. “Ethnic” typefaces, though often only found on sketchy websites offering free font downloads, survive today simply because they are good at what they do: distill an entire culture into a typographical aesthetic that becomes a signifier to the uninitiated.

Chop suey type is just one example of “simulation font”; another can be found in China itself. Dechen Pemba of High Peaks Pure Earth has collected a number examples of Chinese characters designed to mimic Tibetan script, used “from book covers to food packaging to album covers, basically for anything packaged as ‘Tibetan’” in order to “exoticise Tibet and Tibetans.”

© Samuel Wade for China Digital Times (CDT), 2012. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: michigan, racism, san francisco, Tibetan language, United States
Download Tools to Circumvent the Great Firewall

James Fallows opened fire at The Atlantic:

Let’s not even get into the logic of the ad — eg, the fact that China’s formula for creating jobs has involved more public spending and more public “guidance” of industry than America’s. Let’s skip to the bonus points for racial imagery in the ad, apart from the obvious.

1) The “Chinese” woman speaks in American-accented English, and I would bet she is actually an Asian-American. But the script has her make pidgin grammar errors, “Me likee!!”-style.

2) The ad’s words are about trade, budgets, and jobs, but its images are about — ‘Nam!! Of course some parts of southern China look the way this ad does, with rice paddies, palm trees, no big buildings, people wearing conical straw hats and bicycling along dike tops. But this is nothing like how the typical big-factory zone looks in China, or the huge cities that would exemplify Chinese wealth and the country’s rise — ie, the subjects of this ad. So why this rural setting? I think it’s because it offers a kind of visual dog-whistle, for those Americans who, either through experience or through Apocalypse Now-style imagery, associate smiling-but-deceptive Asians in a rice-paddy setting with previous American sorrow.

The accompanying website underlined the charges, hammering the point home with liberal use of takeaway-carton lettering. A brief post at Talking Points Memo noted that, in the page’s source code, images of the Asian woman are identified with the label “yellowgirl”: a possible reference to her shirt, but “probably just another level of the unfortunateness.” (See update below.)

Accusations soon arose that the Hoekstra campaign was deleting critical comments from its Facebook page. A spokesman, meanwhile, insisted that the ad was satirical, and that its use of broken English was intended to highlight China’s great achievements in language education. From Politico:

“You have a Chinese girl speaking English – I want to hit on the education system, essentially. The fact that a Chinese girl is speaking English is a testament to how they can compete with us, when an American boy of the same age speaking Mandarin is absolutely insane, or unthinkable right now,” Hoekstra spokesperson Paul Ciaramitaro told POLITICO. “It exhibits another way in which China is competing with us globally.”

America’s two million first-language Chinese speakers include a growing number who speak Mandarin, some of whom are presumably boys. In addition, there are some 60,000 elementary and secondary school students learning Chinese. These are not large figures compared with China’s 300 million English learners, but neither, perhaps, are they “absolutely insanely” or “unthinkably” small. Ciaramitaro continues:

“I think that China is our global competitor and the facts are what they are. They hold $1.1 trillion of our debt, their economy is booming, ours is not. It’s not a racial overtone to compare yourself to competitors on the global stage,” added Ciaramitaro. “I think the viewer of an ad is going to recognize satire. … I wouldn’t agree of the characterization [of the ad] as racial.”

FOX News’ Juan Williams suggested that the ad may have been a tactical error, with the controversy detracting from its intended message:

[Williams] sees the ad as a wasted opportunity for Hoekstra and not great publicity for the Republican party, “which is often accused of being insensitive toward immigrants.”

“Pete Hoekstra is a very bright guy, but what he is trying to get across here, his concerns about spending and debt, that’s now being obscured by charges of racism,” said Williams. “These charges of racism are resonating right now instead of his views on reigning in the national debt.”

While both Ciaramitaro and Hoekstra claimed that talk of race came from Democrats lacking a substantial response, criticism of the ad was refreshingly bipartisan. “Semi-defrocked senior GOP Political Consultant” Mike Murphy commented that it was “really, really dumb. I mean really“. While some Republicans attacked the ad’s tone or political wisdom, others accused Hoekstra of hypocrisy based on his own spending record. From The Associated Press:

GOP consultant Nick De Leeuw flat-out scolded the Holland Republican for the ad.

“Stabenow has got to go. But shame on Pete Hoekstra for that appalling new advertisement,” De Leeuw wrote on his Facebook page Sunday morning. “Racism and xenophobia aren’t any way to get things done ….”

“Saving America from the Washington, D.C., politicians who gave us this crippling debt and deficit crisis, Republican and Democrat alike, means Hoekstra and Stabenow should both get benched,” [Hoekstra's GOP Senate primary rival Gary] Glenn said in a release.

The Michigan Democrat Party has similarly focused on Hoekstra’s credentials as a crusader for low spending, playing up Republican and Tea Party accusations that he had supported big spending as a congressman and lobbyist.

As The Detroit Free Press’ Bob Campbell pointed out, the MDP has itself played the China card in the past, in a 2006 ad attacking GOP gubernatorial candidate Dick DeVos for exporting jobs. The factories to which they were relocated were, again, curiously absent from the China on screen:

Hoekstra’s ad has so far attracted little attention on the other side of the Pacific, however. From Isaac Stone Fish at Foreign Policy:

… There is scant chatter of it on Sina Weibo or Tencent Weibo, the two most popular Twitter-like microblogging services. The NFL, lacking the popularity that Yao Ming brought to the NBA, is rarely watched in China anyway, and the ads this year that drew any attention were mostly car commercials.

Only a handful of Twitter users wrote about it in simplified Mandarin (the way Chinese is written in Mainland China, unlike the traditional characters which the Debbiespenditnow website inexplicably employs). One who did so is a software engineer working in the Netherlands who tweets under the name lihlii. “I don’t think it’s racist,” he said in a phone interview. “It’s about America losing jobs ….”

Those who did object to the ad generally did so in an American context. Michael Anti, a popular blogger who has lived in the U.S. as a Nieman Fellow, wrote on Twitter:

“I think the problem with the ad is that it’s racist, not anti-Chinese. As a Chinese I should be amused by this ad, because it seems more like Southeast Asia. But Chinese in America are easily enraged by that sort of prejudicial defamation of the image of a Chinese woman. Also, her English is not the Chinglish of a Mainland Chinese.”

Update: James Fallows noted that the “yellowgirl” reference in the site’s code has now been changed to “yellowshirtgirl”. On MSNBC, Lawrence O’Donnell took aim at “yellowshirtgirl” herself. From Mediaite:

“I want to know exactly what she was thinking,” he noted, and then turned back the Hoekstra, in effect accusing him of hiding behind her image and suggesting one thing is for him to expound ideas and another “for him to hire an actor to do his dirty work for him.”

“It can be stopped right now, tonight, by a pledge of simple decency that all member of the Screen Actors’ Guild can make,” he noted, putting his right hand up as to make a promise: “I will not play dirty politics… that means that you will not play a character in political ads.” After his attack on the actor in the video, however, he explained that many actors engage in such things because of money problems, recounting the story of an actor he once “talked out of playing Hitler’s daughter” by asking if, in the worst case scenario that that was the last part she ever played, she would want to be remembered by it. “I have done things that I’m not proud of,” he concluded, “but I have not done anything I am ashamed of.”

While the Hoekstra campaign insists that talk of race is a desperate evasion by Democrats, the ad’s argument has also received a sound thrashing. From Asia Society:

Yunfan Sun, Program Officer at the Center on U.S.-China Relations [pointed] out glaring flaws in Hoekstra’s polarizing “Pete Spend-it-Not” position.

“It is precisely the ‘Spend-it-Not’ mentality in the United States that has been sending jobs overseas, where cheaper labor and materials, as well as tax breaks, lead to increases in the bottom lines of big corporations,” Sun said. “And the fact that the U.S. government can’t or won’t spend on infrastructure is precisely why Chinese companies get to build things like new subway lines in New York City.”

The New Yorker’s Evan Osnos pointed out other problems:

For all the xenophobia and mistakes, the thing that might really worry a voter is that a man can get this far in the U.S. political system without a basic grip on the mechanics of his government. “You borrow more and more,” the N.P.S.A. [Nondescript Presumably Scary Asian] says. But that is false, says the U.S. Treasury. Chinese holdings of U.S. treasury bonds, in fact, declined from November of 2010 to November 2011. “China has not been a major buyer of U.S. treasury notes on the margin for a couple of years now,” Victor Shih, an expert on Chinese economics and politics at Northwestern University, told me.

When Hoekstra’s point collides with fact, he calls in the help of a large font: he describes China as “the largest foreign holder of U.S. Treasury securities”—which is true—but then describes China’s holdings as increasing from 9.6 per cent in 2002 to twenty-six per cent in 2010. A voter might blanch at the idea of a foreign country holding over a quarter of U.S. Treasury debt, except that it’s not true. The twenty-six per cent is China’s holdings among foreign holders, not overall debt, and “the overall share of treasury held by foreign entities declined in the past couple of years,” Shih told me. (“One thing that Americans have to realize is that China may be a net lender internationally, but the Chinese government and state-owned enterprises borrow a huge amount of money domestically,” Shih added. “The racist caricature of those thrifty Chinese who take advantage of debt-loving Americans is widely off the mark because China is one of the most indebted countries in the world.”)

© Samuel Wade for China Digital Times (CDT), 2012. | Permalink | 3 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: James Fallows, Michael Anti, racism, United States, US debt, Vietnam
Download Tools to Circumvent the Great Firewall

As a prisoner at the Jixi labour camp, Liu Dali would slog through tough days breaking rocks and digging trenches in the open cast coalmines of north-east China. By night, he would slay demons, battle goblins and cast spells.

Liu says he was one of scores of prisoners forced to play online games to build up credits that prison guards would then trade for real money. The 54-year-old, a former prison guard who was jailed for three years in 2004 for “illegally petitioning” the central government about corruption in his hometown, reckons the operation was even more lucrative than the physical labour that prisoners were also forced to do.

“Prison bosses make more money forcing inmates to play games than they do forcing people to do manual labour,” Liu told the Guardian. “There were 300 prisoners forced to play games. We worked 12-hour shifts in the camp. I heard them say they could earn 5,000-6,000rmb [£470-570] a day. We didn’t see any of the money. The computers were never turned off ….”

According to figures from the China Internet Centre, nearly £1.2bn of make- believe currencies were traded in China in 2008 and the number of gamers who play to earn and trade credits are on the rise.

A 2007 New York Times article described the gold farming phenomenon in greater depth, including the campaigns of extermination frequently waged on gold farmers by other players. These can have serious real-world consequences for the farmers: in-game death costs time and treasure, leading to missed quotas and firing or, in the case of prisoners like Liu, physical punishment.

It isn’t that WoW players don’t frequently kill other players for fun and kill points. They do. But there is usually more to it when the kill in question is a gold farmer. In part because gold farmers’ hunting patterns are so repetitive, they are easy to spot, making them ready targets for pent-up anti-R.M.T. hostility, expressed in everything from private sarcastic messages to gratuitous ambushes that can stop a farmer’s harvesting in its tracks. In homemade World of Warcraft video clips that circulate on YouTube or GameTrailers, with titles like “Chinese Gold Farmers Must Die” and “Chinese Farmer Extermination,” players document their farmer-killing expeditions through that same Timbermaw-ridden patch of WoW in which Min does his farming — a place so popular with farmers that Western players sometimes call it China Town. Nick Yee, an M.M.O. scholar based at Stanford, has noted the unsettling parallels (the recurrence of words like “vermin,” “rats” and “extermination”) between contemporary anti-gold-farmer rhetoric and 19th-century U.S. literature on immigrant Chinese laundry workers.

Min’s English is not good enough to grasp in all its richness the hatred aimed his way. But he gets the idea. He feels a little embarrassed around regular players and sometimes says he thinks about how he might explain himself to those who believe he has no place among them, if only he could speak their language. “I have this idea in mind that regular players should understand that people do different things in the game,” he said. “They are playing. And we are making a living.”

Gold farming is frequently conflated with Chinese nationality (PDF), according to Lisa Nakamura of the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign:

Constance Steinkuehler’s analysis of Lineage II, a Korean MMO uncovered some the ways in which the condemnation of virtual currency buying is far exceeded by a visceral hatred of gold sellers or farmers. This hatred is strongly articulated to race and ethnicity: since many, but not all, gold farmers are Chinese, and there is a decidedly anti-Asian flavor to many player protests against “Chinese gold farmers.” As Steinkuehler notes, hatred of gold farmers has given rise to polls querying players on North American servers “Is it OK to Hate Chinese Players?” (32% of players responded “yes,” and the majority, 39%, replied “I don’t hate China, just what they stand for in L2,” and 10% checked “I am CN and you should mind yourself, you racist pig”).(Steinkuehler 2006, p 200) Though she notes “calling someone ‘Chinese’ is a general insult that seems aimed more at one’s style of play than one’s real-world ethnicity,” the construction of Chinese identity in MMO’s as abject, undesirable, and socially contaminated racializes the culture of online games, a culture that scholars such as Castronova have claimed are unique (and valuable) because they are exempt from “real world” problems such as racism, classism, “looksism” and other types of social inequality.

Gold farmers face other dangers. Late last year, Global Voices Online covered the sentencing of a pair of gold-farm owners to six and three-year prison terms. The post includes translated comments from blogger Ruan Yifeng, who argued that the disproportionate harshness of the punishment was imposed for the sake of game developers Shanda:

It’s loathsome to see the state judiciary serve to protect the interests of a company in such a way, and to issue a judicial interpretation which benefits Capital and sends those who haven’t committed any crime to prison.

Now, with this judicial precedent, it’ll be far easier for Internet game companies to profit as anyone who dares use a mod can be sent straight to jail! Faced with such roaring profits, who will care about the rights of the little people? Dong Jie and Chen Zhu have had their lives destroyed, but who cares if, this way, we succeed in putting the fear in other thieves? In any event, nobody forced Dong and Chen to lose their heads and go start plucking the hairs off a tiger.

© Samuel Wade for China Digital Times (CDT), 2011. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: forced labor, gaming, gold farming, online games, prisoners, racism
Download Tools to Circumvent the Great Firewall

The small-business landscape in China is littered with stories of customers who have felt swindled by investors who have fled the scene. When Mr. Cabo started teaching at the Shangxuele Children’s Activity Center in suburban Beijing a few months ago, he certainly did not expect to be embroiled in one of them. Nor did he expect to use his personal savings to reopen the center.

In mid-July, its owners hung up a sign saying the center was undergoing plumbing repairs. Then they disappeared, leaving about 100 students and about 20 staff members in the lurch. It was only after Mr. Cabo called Yao Gang, one of the three owners, that he learned the center had been closed permanently.

“You read about this in the newspapers, but you never think it’s going to happen to you,” Mr. Cabo said. “I just felt so bad for these children.”

Mr. Cabo also sensed a business opportunity. China’s ultracompetitive education system and the government’s population control policies, which generally limit urban families to one child, have created a vibrant market for extracurricular education. Almost every middle-class couple is willing to spend extra money to give their child a leg up when applying to top-ranked universities.

So Mr. Cabo emptied his bank account of about 60,000 renminbi, or about $9,000, and began paying the bills. Now he is struggling to keep the center open, dealing not only with parents but also with corrupt police officers, physical violence toward his staff and bewilderment on the part of many Beijing residents at his very existence.

© Sophie Beach for China Digital Times (CDT), 2010. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: education, foreigners in China, racism
Download Tools to Circumvent the Great Firewall

Emma, the community leader, had just returned from telling a Nigerian family their son had died. He jumped from the sixth floor as he fled police and the hospital had concluded there was no point keeping him on life support. “He was 30. If not for the police he might be alive today,” she says.

Guangzhou public security bureau did not respond to queries. But Emma argued the raids merely pushed people underground and into crime, when the city should be benefiting from them.

Business has fallen by a third to a half, say Chinese vendors who depend on African clients. Migrants are already leaving Guangzhou for cities with more sympathetic officials.

Mary Ngum – not her real name – is here legitimately but says she would rather return to west Africa than endure police raids and wider discrimination.

Elegant and well-spoken, she sighs over the headmaster who refused to hire her to teach “because you are black”; the strangers who hold their noses when she sits beside them on the bus; the derogatory remarks she overhears. Many blame ignorance, not malice, but she thinks Guangzhou worse than other cities she has lived in: “They are always talking about colour,” she says.

Some fear popular prejudice is growing, and fuelling the crackdown.

Read more about Africans in China via CDT.

© Sophie Beach for China Digital Times (CDT), 2010. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: Africans in China, foreigners in China, Guangzhou, racism
Download Tools to Circumvent the Great Firewall

We’ll probably never know what motivated a team of editors and graphic artists working for People’s Daily and Xinhua, the Chinese state-owned wired service, to collaborate on — or at least greenlight posting — a slideshow of American celluloid celebrities photoshopped in blackface. But the results are causing an uproar. Yesterday, the slideshow, which featured celebs ranging from  Lady Gaga to Madonna to Jennifer Anniston, ran on both of those Chinese news sources’ web sites. The headline on the People’s Daily site was: “If hot stars were blackened.”

By the time the Wall Street Journal contacted Xinhua for comment, the slideshow link had been disabled, yet screen grabs are preserved here (by WSJ) and here (by the blog Shanghaiist). The credit line that ran with the original slideshow was “CRI Online,” which the Journal speculates may refer to China Radio International, a state-run news service. That fact, however, has not been confirmed.

Naturally, online protests have erupted. And there’s plenty to be said about the haphazardness of news judgment in China and about the hugely disconcerting mix of discrimination and voyeurism surrounding race in a country where prosperous eastern cities are largely racially homogenous.

See also an open letter to Xinhua over this issue by McClatchy’s China correspondent Tom Lasseter.

© Sophie Beach for China Digital Times (CDT), 2010. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: racism, Xinhua
Download Tools to Circumvent the Great Firewall

It all started with the lure of the glitz, the glamour and the dream of being China’s next pop star. But, as with many reality shows, Lou Jing’s instant fame came with unanticipated consequences.

Lou Jing was born 20 years ago in Shanghai to a Chinese mother and an African-American father. According to her mother, who asked not to be identified in this report, she met Lou’s father while she was still in college. He left China before their daughter was born.

Growing up with a single mom in central Shanghai, Lou Jing said she had good friends and lived a normal life. “When I was young, I didn’t feel any different,” she said.

© Liu Yong for China Digital Times (CDT), 2009. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: Lou Jing, multiracial, racism
Download Tools to Circumvent the Great Firewall