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[MK]

Hmm, not sure if this is run of the mill violence or a high-water mark in anti-foreigner sentiment...I was in Sanlitun twice, in 2001 (holiday in China) and then in 2004 (living in Beijing), was pretty laid back then if a touch seedy, but seems like hell on earth now.

Reading the news is confusing:

It seems Yang Rui was insensitive, but shouldn't be sacked, but that Russian footsie player got what was coming to him but then again, foreigners should not be "excessively profiled".  So, it seems people can get angry (at foreigners) so long as they do it with maturity, but where does a Weibo campaign dedicated to cleaning up "Foreign Scumbags" fit in to all of this?

I was on a train at the weekend and a guy was in my (first class) seat.  He had no ticket but refused to move even when I spoke Chinese and showed him my ticket (I am confident in my ability to say "this is my seat" pretty clearly).  Should I have filmed the incident on my mobile and uploaded the video as an example of all Chinese people's behaviour? 

(Another (Chinese) passenger intervened on my side and then he moved, thanks guy, but shouldn't have been necessary...plus I am pretty sure filming or taking pictures would have escalated the situation in a bad way.)

[The Local Dialect]

Yeah, I just don't know. No one in Beijing has been hostile towards me, but then, I'm a woman and I wonder if it would be different if I were a guy. I don't go to Sanlitun except occasionally for dinner, it isn't really my scene. I think if anything though Sanlitun is much less seedy than it used to be, as there are now a lot of upscale shops and eateries in the area. The nasty bars and the drug dealers are still there, but they're no longer the only reason you might find yourself in Sanlitun. But sure, it is a bar district and fights happen. The girl who got beat up, that's surely not normal, but she was Chinese American and looked Asian, so it is hard to know the motives of the attackers. Did the situation escalate because of the foreign couple that intervened? It is hard to say.

At the same time, I do feel like people have been noticing me more, commenting more, but I'm not sure if that is paranoia or if there really is a weird vibe in the air. I have been trying to be aware but also not trying to ascribe motives to people that I wouldn't have ascribed before. I mean, I was never under the assumption that people who yell hello at me on the street are just being friendly, and I know that the anti foreign sentiment has always been there to a degree, I am just not sure if the degree is any greater now than it was a month ago.

[fullricebowl]

This weekend, a good friend of mine was in a bar near Gulou and about 20 police officers rounded up all the foreigners and made them show documents. Two of them had perfect English and some kind of rehearsed script about how they were just trying to protect them and if they were foreigners in their country they would always carry their documents. Photocopies of documents were not acceptable and everyone without papers just stood there in the bar with all the police for several hours. My friend was able to call someone to pick up his documents and bring them to him, but I have no idea how long everyone else had to stand there. Apparently you need to carry hard copy passport, fec, and police registration with you at all times now. Blah.

Of course, this wonderful use of the local police force makes me even more upset when I read about all the crap in Sanlitun that apparently the police are too busy to deal with.

[Stil]

I was out this past weekend having a few with some friends. In the bar our group of 3 became a larger group of about 10 quickly. Now this was a mixed group of foreigners and Chinese. There were 3 Chinese girls in the group but they were not with any of the foreigners. Conversation got around to the situation in Beijing. All of the group knew about the UK guy and the Russian and Yang Rui but none of them (even the foreigners *sigh*) knew about the document checking policy.

The Chinese group talked adamantly about cleaning up the foreigner problem there. Interesting enough is that they have no problems with us foreigners here in Changsha. There are often some foreigners that behave poorly in the bar ( this year it’s a group of Brits, last year Americans, I'll try to make it Canadians next year) but they don't worry about it. They just say they are drunk, no problem. They consider the Beijing (and Shanghai) foreigners to be completely different. Not country related or even race related (to an extent).

I don't know the reasons for this as they just would say Beijing foreigners are different.

For me in Changsha, nothing has changed. Nothing different with the locals or police. No  unusual feelings of resentment, animosity etc. As far as I know, there has been no document checking. Nothing about it in the local press either.

It's just a story for us here and really not as interesting to most as the Yunnan cannibal.

[The Local Dialect]

That's interesting that they think it is just a Beijing problem. As far as I can tell, the only difference between Beijing's foreigners and other places' foreigners is that there are more of us in Beijing.

In fact, the big city foreigners are far more likely to be the "right" kind of foreigners -- the ones working for foreign companies and thus contributing positively to China's economy. The expat package expats may or may not be assholes but they're certainly not "foreign trash" in the sense that they're residing here illegally doing illegal things. Beijing also has a lot of students, and tourists, but China gave them legitimate visas for those purposes. I think there are probably more foreign weirdos slipping through the cracks in smaller cities actually because in order to actually sustain any sort of reasonable lifestyle in Beijing you really cannot be a total waster. Unlike other parts of China, it isn't the sort of place where you can spend the week drunk, teach a part time class on the weekend and expect to earn enough money to get you drunk again the next week.

I sort of wonder, in the average Chinese person's mind, who these mythical illegal problem foreigners really are. The Russian guy was a totally legal worker -- no cleanup campaign would have stopped him from being a jerk. The British guy, as far as we know, was here on a tourist visa. Asshole tourists? Every country has those.

This is sort of what bothers me about this whole foreign "problem." It is one thing to say we're going to stop people from working on improper visas, but that doesn't seem to be what is actually being said here. There's some sort of nebulous definition of "foreign trash" or "problem foreigners" floating around that actually has very little to do with legal status, even if the authorities want to pretend it does.

[Fozzwaldus]

yeah, haven't felt anything related to this in Ningbo AT ALL, in fact all the talk here is of a massive Chinese v Chinese brawl in the Old Bund area.

Again, we have the 'right kind of foreigners' here...

that said, if I lived in BJ (or was reading about this more online) I might feel a bit more sensitive, and understandibly so. I think the best advice I can give is to be a little more polite/smiley than usual, not to read too much into the (same old) stares, and to stay away from Sanlitun, cos it's a shithole at the best of times.

[kitano]

I don't really go out anyway lol

I do think that one of the differences between foreigners in 1st tier cities and 2nd tiers cities is the one that you get in every country where megacities don't belong to the country in a way. It may be because I'm not that social but I don't think there are any areas even here in HZ which is definitely a big city where you have Moroccan drug dealers or whatever like in Beijing, Shanghai or Guangzhou. In the smaller cities I lived in definitely not. There is always a guy who can get you stuff, but not any kind of overt gangs or anything

[MK]

mythical illegal problem foreigners

That's it though, isn't it.  'Mythical illegal problem foreigner' doesn't actually exist, but at the same time we are all potentially 'mythical illegal problem foreigner' in someone's eyes.

And, yeah, the only really substantial foreign populations are in the three (?) big mega-cities so why the nation-wide media campaign?

[zero]

Because the "audience" for the campaign is not the foreigners, but the Chinese people living throughout the country. It appears to be related to the once-every-10-years leadership change in Beijing. They want to distract people from domestic problems and get them to look to "outsiders" as the root of any problems. Less chance of unrest that way.

[yli]

I'm a foreigner (at this point), but I appear to be Chinese and I speak Chinese fluently.

What's the likelihood I'd fail a spot check for a visa/documents? I don't want to carry my passport around with me thanks to the pickpocket problem in China (and because I'm entirely too forgetful to be wandering around with something like my passport in my pocket).

[zero]

Given your appearance, you are never going to be spot-checked in this crackdown unless they happen to come to your employer. In that case, if you didn't have the appropriate documents on you, there is a 100 percent chance you'd fail.

[Fozzwaldus]

Because the "audience" for the campaign is not the foreigners, but the Chinese people living throughout the country. It appears to be related to the once-every-10-years leadership change in Beijing. They want to distract people from domestic problems and get them to look to "outsiders" as the root of any problems. Less chance of unrest that way.

yep. pretty clear to me that this is it. rally to the flag.

[El Macho]

My new employer has asked for my passport and FEC so they can do the visa transfer and get my new RP. I'm really not happy about not having it to carry around. Any suggestions as to what I might do?

[Stil]

Just carry photocopies and if you get stopped, tell them they are being processed. I suppose you could get a chopped receipt from the school saying they have it, but it has to be ok for it to be processed.

[DC@54055]

I'd like to comment that I think that video is fake. But the fact remains, Be careful in Beijing, I heard a story of foreigners being locked in a bar for a few hours while they all had to get there pictures taken. Doesn't sound fun.