The colonial sleaze of China’s sexpats

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The colonial sleaze of China’s sexpats

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A view from the Bund in Shanghai. (Unsplash)

Justin Ward
Jul 31


Here was a colonizer from the very country that flooded China with opium and set fire to the Old Summer Palace— a pillager claiming Chinese women as trophies, like so many Zodiac statues and Pekinese dogs.

Several years before I arrived in China, a blogger who posted under the name Chinabounder, had scandalized the country with similarly salacious stories of his sexual exploits in a blog called Sex in Shanghai. It has all of the misogyny of Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer but none of the artistry. A sample: “But though I was tired of her, pussy is pussy, and so I kept her on a little longer for fuck fun.”

Although it was written over a decade ago, it’s worth revisiting Sex and Shanghai because it provides a window into a mindset that remains prevalent in China today— a Western mode of thinking about the East that is eternal, firmly rooted in more than a century of colonialism.

Said argues that representation and study of the East is a tool of Western hegemony. It’s no coincidence that the golden age of Western “exploration” and ethnography was also the high water mark of colonialism. It was a time when adventurers, like Richard “Dirty Dick” Burton traveled East and “went native,” documenting in lurid detail the sex lives of subject peoples.

By the time I got there, this function had been privatized. One time I was talking to a girl at a bar in Nanluoguxiang—not even hitting on her per se, just asking benign questions about her job from a respectful distance—and this Chinese guy obnoxiously wedged himself in between us. He didn’t even know her but still felt it his duty to defend her from the guilao.

To this last one, he adds a note in parenthesis: “I’d told her I dreamed of her. I had not. But telling a woman this is an effective gauge of where she sees the relationship going. It is a shallow and obvious thing to say, and would not work on a Western woman, but of such flimflam is my box of tricks made.”



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