Expats, barfights, nationalism and Yang Rui

The Beijinger has an article here on a recent incident in a nightclub in the (in)famous Sanlitun 三里屯 district of Chaoyang where an American national was reportedly struck in the back of the head with a sharp object and beaten by the nightclub’s bouncers. For the most part, the article advises for expats just the plain basic commonsense of the sort which any junior going abroad from Kalamazoo College gets drilled into her stateside the year before: don’t get completely wasted in public. Don’t go looking for trouble. If someone wants to pick a fight with you, defuse the situation as quickly as possible and walk away. In short, don’t do anything that would embarrass you if you did it in any major city in the United States. Unfortunately, the fact that it has to be said over and over again seems to indicate that the message sometimes has a difficult time getting through to people.

My cohort from Kalamazoo College during my time at Capital Normal University were on the whole a pretty well-behaved bunch; but even we kind of bent the rules from time to time. Once, being charged with caring for a friend who got so drunk he couldn’t stand on his own, I had to defuse the situation when the cab driver we were with attempted to charge us extra because my friend had vomited whilst in the car (in his defence, most of it was discharged out the window), and then made a fuss of it when we tried to talk him down. Is there a point to this story? Well, I suppose if there is any, it can be said that we expats (well, ex-expats in my case) aren’t necessarily saints. Alienation, isolation, cheap vice, the language barrier and the halo of US governmental protection are a weakening influence on the expat soul (I do speak from experience). Gilman Grundy at FOARP made a similar point some time ago, here and here. In addition, there is the fishbowl effect and the knowledge that every action you take will be scrutinised and will reflect in the eyes of your beholders upon your mother country as a whole; Peace Corps was (very understandably) very concerned about this, and rumours travel faster than lightning in rural Qazaqstan, even if they are unsubstantiated.

The bigger story is that after Yang Rui of CCTV Dialogue made his incendiary comments about al-Jazeera’s Melissa Chan and about foreigners in China generally, there has been an outpour of pious concern from the expat community and from the West more generally about the safety of travelling abroad in China. His comments, of course, were uncalled-for, xenophobia being an ugly and vicious thing regardless of where it comes from. But there is far, far more to the story than merely just a xenophobic talk-show host mouthing off in response to two isolated incidents in Wudaokou and Sanlitun (areas which by virtue of their primary mode of business have higher rates of crime in general than most other areas of Beijing). There is, of course, more to the story than just Chinese people being stoked to fury by a cynical government and news media attempting to drum up support (or at least to distract from other major issues) through cheap nationalism.

It’s the equally-ugly comments in the English-language Chinese blogosphere about ‘stupid cab drivers’ and ‘neo-Boxers’ (ignoring the historical context that, while the Boxers committed many heinous crimes, they had genuine and valid concerns about unequal trade status and extraterritoriality of foreign nationals). It’s the passive-aggressive ‘see, Chinese can be racists too / are the real racists’ line (as though that excuses racism coming from any other quarter). It’s the subtle classist undertone that uneducated, lower-class Chinese people are ‘really’ the ones to blame for the woes of the expats, and that expats are entitled to be there because their degrees make them ‘the best and the brightest’, taking up the white man’s burden help the backwards and benighted ingrates to learn their language, et cetera. Illogical and bigoted fenqing are a phenomenon that is far from unique to China; the sooner we acknowledge that as the case, the easier it will be to talk to (rather than just shout past) each other.