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 
