Sep 3, 2006
Chinese see red over foreigner's sex blog
SHANGHAI - AN ANONYMOUS blog by a British teacher in Shanghai detailing his alleged sexual exploits with Chinese women has provoked fury among locals - even though the blog could be a hoax.
The blog has also sparked a campaign by Internet vigilantes in China.
The Sex and Shanghai website, which has now been closed down, described in occasionally lurid terms the conquests of the author, who called himself 'Chinabounder'.
At times, he made disparaging remarks about Chinese men and women.
The outrage over the blog spiralled last week after a Shanghai academic launched an Internet campaign to have the author deported from China.
'We must find this foreign trash and kick him out of China,' wrote psychology Professor Zhang Jiehai, who is with the Shanghai Academy of Social Sciences, in a weblog titled The Hunt for the Immoral Foreigner.
The veracity of the sex blog is unclear. In response to an e-mail query to the Internet address on the Chinabounder site, a message said the content was all invented by a group of writers from several countries, including China. The real identity of Chinabounder is still unknown.
Shanghai has a large and fast-growing population of expatriates who rarely report instances of racial tension.
But the Chinabounder blog touched a raw nerve. Prof Zhang's own website has been inundated with messages, mostly in support, since he denounced Sex and Shanghai.
'Let's sweep the white trash out of the country,' wrote one Internet user, while another said: 'We should expose him to the public so we can punish him and set an example for other foreigners.'
Other respondents were more reflective. 'A fly does not eat a cracked egg,' wrote one. 'We should examine ourselves first.'
Before Sex and Shanghai was closed down last week, Chinabounder had responded to the criticism, saying he was not proud of some of his comments about former girlfriends but he called Prof Zhang a 'bigot and a parasite'.
Prof Zhang, taking a more conciliatory tone at his Shanghai office on Friday, said that his comments were not a nationalist attack on the anonymous blogger, but an attempt to get his Chinese readers to think about the sense of inferiority they sometimes feel.
'The most important goal was to teach Chinese to understand their self-pity,' he said. -- Financial Times
