“Internet manhunts” are increasingly common in China, and as one foreign blogger found out, not being Chinese doesn’t mean you can’t become a target

Sex, drugs and rock 'n roll are all fair game in the wide open spaces of the blogosphere, but as the saying goes, “with great opportunity comes great responsibility.” Bloggers, one in particular, have found that what they write online has the potential to come back and bite them in the real world.
Chinabounder, the anonymous author of “Sex and Shanghai” (once at chinabounder.blogspot.com, but now open to “invited readers only”), featured lurid accounts of his trysts with a multitude of Chinese women. In between writing posts with titles like “F*ing Mona,” he speared Chinese men as inept lovers and Chinese politics as iniquitous and corrupt. This perfect storm of sex, politics and misandry brewed for months, but it wasn’t until after Blogspot became accessible on the mainland at the beginning of August that the proverbial shit hit the fan.

The fan’s name is Dr. Zhang Jiehai, a professor of psychology at the Shanghai Academy of Social Science, who wrote a post titled “The Internet Hunt for an Immoral Foreigner” on his blog at the end of August. His post calls for the Chinese masses to rise up and “kick [Chinabounder] out of China before National Day” (blog.phoenixtv.com/user3/zhangjiehai). The post has been widely circulated around the Chinese blogosphere and mainstream media, and was translated in full by East South North West:

Today, with tremendous anger, I will tell you the story of an immoral foreigner and I call upon all Chinese compatriots to get together and kick this immoral foreigner out of China....

In his blog, he used extremely obscene and filthy language to record how he – a foreign language teacher in Shanghai  – used his status as a teacher to dally with Chinese women, most of whom were his students. At the same time, he did everything that he could to insult, debase and distort the Chinese government and the Chinese men.

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The response from the Chinese blogosphere has been overwhelmingly negative toward Chinabounder, with one commenter on Zhang’s original post suggesting that someone “[c]astrate him. Turn him into a eunuch,” and another saying “this dog must be run out of China.”

While this is the first high profile “Internet Manhunt” (网络追逐) against a foreigner, these aggressions have become increasingly common, finally catching the attention of Western media after Howard French penned an article about these mobs for the New York Times:

It began with an impassioned, 5,000-word letter on one of China's most popular Internet bulletin boards, from a husband denouncing a student he suspected of carrying on an affair with his wife.

Immediately, hundreds joined in the attack. “Let's use our keyboard and mouse in our hands as weapons,” as one person wrote, “to chop off the heads of these adulterers, to pay for the sacrifice of the husband.” Within days, the hundreds had grown to thousands, and then tens of thousands, with total strangers forming teams to hunt down the student's identity and address, hounding him out of his university and causing his family to barricade themselves inside their home.

As if in anticipation of an unwanted lynching, reports suddenly surfaced claiming that the “Sex and Shanghai” blog was a hoax perpetrated by a group of performance artists “as an investigation into online vigilante behavior” (smh.com.au). If so, as a foreign man in China, I’d like to give these “artists” two big fingers of thanks for all they’ve done for me and my peers.

However, whether or not Chinabounder was real is immaterial. Though the exact events he described may not have occurred, there is no doubt that promiscuous men (both Chinese and foreign) exist in China, though unlike Chinabounder, the rest seem to have enough good sense not to write about their dalliances publicly.

In fact, it was the act of writing about the sex, not the sex itself, that landed Chinabounder in Zhang’s crosshairs. Despite a lot of Confucian moral hand-waving, Chinese society is rather tolerant of illicit sex – I could stand on the roof of my apartment building and hit a dozen “massage parlors” with a rock, and I neither live in a seedy area nor possess Dan Marino’s arm – but only so long as it goes on outside of the public view. By airing an “open secret” (公开的秘密) Chinabounder made himself a target for activities that are far more common than many Chinese would like to admit.

Zhang’s motivations are less clear. His play to nationalism is obvious, both from his choice of the date by which he wanted Chinabounder kicked out of China (October 1st) and his call to “all Chinese compatriots” to join in the hunt for the “immoral foreigner.” Not all Chinese bloggers are jumping on the bandwagon though. Others, such as the author of “Choose Strength” don't see it as black and white as Zhang does:

Looking at it in another way, don’t these sanctimonious Chinese professors have skeletons in their own closets? Instead of Professor Zhang and others exploding into rage over this foreigner, why don’t they draft an open letter at their own institutions calling for a truly moral and ethical way of life? Perhaps it wouldn't make any difference, but its significance would be much greater than what's currently happening.

wq8911.blog.hexun.com

While many Chinese I know could care less about the entire affair, it’s not like foreigners in China, particularly those in relationships with Chinese, aren’t already viewed with enough suspicion. It may well have a “chilling effect” on what other foreign bloggers dare write about online, as the line between what is acceptable to the mob and what is not is by no means clear. Whatever happens, it is an important reminder that what we write in the virtual world, no matter how ethereal it may seem, can affect us in the real world.