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And China makes it easy for us to lounge through existence, to sink like sediment through the day. It is the difference between Chinese and Western women that allows guys like me, guys in general, to live in the way that gives Chinadirt so much contempt to pour on us.

Chinese women have a very different tradition to follow than Western women. Personal freedom has always been denied to Chinese women by their country’s culture. Even today, for all its patina of modernization, the personal life of Chinese women is still controlled – cabined, cribbed and confined.

Mona, for example, a fantastic former lover, bold and imaginative – Mona represents the best of modern Chinese woman (not that I in any way wish to prescribe what a woman ‘should’ be). But even Mona, smart, confident, determined, funny, even Mona is controlled by the wider patterns of society. Her mother was staying with her for a few weeks, and while Mona was at work, the mother would go through every inch of her flat, her drawers, cupboards, wardrobe. And not at all covertly – to her, it was simply a mother’s right to do this. Mona, being quite up to the minute, has several mobile phones, and one of these she left at home. Her mother read all the messages on it and found one from a lover saying something along the lines of ‘You were great in bed the other night.’ This lover was a Chinese guy, and his message was thus in Chinese, meaning Mona’s mother understood it, as would not have been the case was it from her Western lover.

Mona’s mother was horrified by this, and when Mona came home asked, incredulous, “You are not a virgin any more?” Mona concocted some tale about this being a message she was relaying for a friend. Her mother, Mona told me, did not really believe it.

I suggested Mona could have just told the truth, and said this was how her life was, and she was nothing different in it. But she told me her mother would not have been able to handle that. And indeed she said ‘Already she’s said she wants to die, she’s said “The only reason I’ll stay alive is because of your grandparents”’ – What awful parental blackmail! How little the parents understand their children, and how much they want to control them.

Now of course Chinese women today have far more freedom than even a few years ago, and Mona does indeed live a relatively free life. But even so, she still lives that life within strict confines. She cannot show the reality of it to her mother, and her freedom is thus only a limited, carefully defined level of freedom. Nor can she show the reality of it to most Chinese guys. She, like many of my women friends, has told me several times that too many Chinese guys simply cannot handle the reality of the life today’s Chinese women often live, or at least want to live.

And this is why she is leaving. She wants out. She’s been driven away by the bullshit this culture imposes on her, by its petty restrictions, by its inability to take her for what she is rather than what it would have her be. She’s got her residence visa to another country, going to that freer country like so many of China’s smartest and brightest, going to be more than she can ever be here. Going against the wishes of her parents, who would have her settle down and produce them a grandchild, going against the advice of her boss that she should stay in her easy, undemanding job. Going, and will not come back.

It is this background that is the walls and bars to the cage a Chinese woman dates in. When she dates a Chinese guy, she is usually in that cell, hemmed in by the strictures of a culture that she knows well. Must play the virgin. Must be bashful in bed. Must have no desires but what her man wants.

But a Western guy is outside that culture; and so when she dates him she is free of the imposed attitude of Chinese culture. Dating a Western guy, she has no framework in which to orient herself. Dating becomes a chance for a different level of personal freedom for her, and (too often) an avenue of exploitation for him

Now Western culture gives women far more freedom to dictate their dating lives than Chinese culture does, which is why Western women won’t put up with such bullshit from Western men. This is unarguably a good thing, and if Chinese culture allowed more of this freedom for its women – if China’s women would fight for it -- then their life would not be quite so overwhelmingly shit as it is now.

But no matter how right or just, when guys like me can escape from those expectations of Western women, we don’t look back. Out here we embrace our nature. Yes; it is oafish, crude, and after many centuries of struggle in the West when women have at last gained some measure of respect (though not much) it is profoundly depressing. But this is who men are. Hence China’s concubine system, for example. Men want to fuck around.

The kind of thing we’re escaping from is clear on Chinadirt:-

To the FHMs [Finding himself man] out there I say:

FIND some maturity by getting a real job. And no, filing one story a week to an unnamed newspaper back home, occasional modeling as the token white boy in some baijiu billboard, and “tutoring” Chinese college girls does not count!

FIND some decency by appreciating your girlfriend-the one who cooked for you after 10 hour workdays, ironed and laid out clothes for you when you had interviews, who puts up with your equally immature friends and pretends not to be lonely when you leave her four times a week to go find yourself on Sanlitun.

FIND some courage to tell your girlfriend the TRUTH about the other woman you’ve been seeing so that your girlfriend doesn’t have to hear about it from other sources and suffer a near anxiety attack in the middle of a dinner party being thrown by her boss.

If you were a real man, you’d FIND a doorway out of this little box of selfishness and oblivion in which you live. You’d FIND a way to recognize that living like a nomad does not make you deep, only pathetic. You’d FIND out that responsibility and commitments aren’t evil constraints but realities of life. You’d FIND that you can’t live like a teenager forever!

Well, what a list of demands, Dame Partlet the hen! And you expect us to stick around for all that? That we will listen to your shouty capitals, your martinet demands, when we could be in the arms of a pliant Chinese woman? Come, come. ‘If you are a real man’ – now there are words to send us right out the door.

And so what is the answer? Perhaps there is none, and nor are the writers of Chinadirt looking for any. They certainly don’t want to hear any advice from us expat guys – though I’m sure most of the email they’ll be receiving from ‘my’ community will be the offensive misogynist bullshit we do so well. No, the point of the site is just to expose what swines we expats can be, and that’s a fine thing to be doing. Seems to me (spite of my comments above) the women writing it know pretty well what they’re about. Long may they shout and punch and scorn. Power upon power to you -- You are right, my dears, all your voices are right. We are the inconstant ones.

Now some people have cast doubt on the veracity of this blog, so today I shall set out to prove the truth of it. For getting fucked in China is easy. The motherland offers endless ways to get the fucking of your life, a fucking more or less unimaginable in another country, and all you have to do is know where to look. So I’m going to share some of that information with you.

The first thing to decide is who you are. Once you’ve done that, you will know where to find the best fuck possible. Below, a few categories to get going:-

· Miner. Current death toll in China’s mines: about 6000 a year. But if you’re poor and have muscles it’s an easy way to make some money. At the mercy of unscrupulous mine owners, and a conniving, corrupt government, down the mine you go. Feed your family. Send a kid to school. Get your parents the healthcare they need to stay alive. Get fucked. Crushed, gassed, drowned, burned or exploded. Plenty of choice. And not in mines alone – countrywide, an average of 320 people are killed at work every single day.

· Patient. Now you’re at the mercy of doctors who overprescribe expensive drugs to turn a fast buck. At the mercy of hospital administrators who’ll let you die in front of them if you can’t afford their fee. At the mercy of the crooks and thieves who (once more with rapacious CPC officials’ assistance) produce vast quantities of fake drugs. Money! If you threw Zheng Xiaoyu a few dollars, when he was head of China’s State Food and Drugs Administration, you could get a license to produce your own medicine. Before he took over, fewer than a hundred producers got this license. Afterwards, more than two thousand. So take your choice; a fake sugar pill that doesn’t alleviate your symptoms or a poison confection that gives you a whole new set. But China can screw better than that – why fuck individuals when you could fuck the whole country? Take the fake anti-rabies drugs blithely produced by the unscrupulous and greedy, no matter that rabies is currently China’s most infectious disease. And why fuck the whole country when you could fuck the whole planet? Take Tamiflu, a drug that may help stop the next global avian flu pandemic. Tons of it, fake, streaming out of China. But so what? As long as someone makes money, what if 50 million die as the disease spreads unchecked by fake medicine?

· Farmer. Think you have any right to your land? Think again. Expect to be forced off it when the local party guy sells it to a developer. If he’s a commie with a conscience you may get a few thousand yuan share of his millions before he sends in the police to beat you away – or maybe shoot you. Take the village of Dongzhou, for example, where police shot and killed villagers protesting about their land being stolen. How many? The police admit to three, the villagers say 20. But given China’s prowess in such fuckery, who do you believe?

· Student. Assuming you can come up with the bribe to get into university in the first place, there are plenty of ways to get a good fucking here, and the simplest of all is forced sex with your tutor if you’re a cute girl. But how about if you live in northwestern China where, year after year, education leaders shut the schools at harvest time and sent the pupils to work eight to twelve hours a day in the fields? A good hard fuck there for the 18 year old who fell off a tractor and was crushed to death. And what about dancing school that sent 22 of its 15 to 16 year old pupils halfway across the country to work as prostitutes? What of the middle school teacher who forced two sassy girls to drink a bottle of 50% proof alcohol (after which they had to go to hospital) and then beat the boy who stood up for them? Or what about the kids of poor migrant workers? Snobby cities like Shanghai don’t provide education for them, but when the parents set up their own school for the kids, what happens? Shanghai closes it down. So goodbye Jianying Hope School, shut down after 11 years of giving education to poor kids when no-one else would; just one more recipient of the colossal fuck power of China.

· Woman. You get some of the finest fucking China has to offer. Sure, I am doing my best to bed as many of the female population as I can. But I am as nothing to the mighty shafting power of the motherland. Let’s move past the big fact that China has the world’s highest rate of female suicides, and focus on a small fact – Yang Dongyan. He was a farmer who, looking to make a buck, bought a woman (for women are livestock too in China) so that he could sell her on as a bride, making a nice profit. But then he met a pal who told him the woman would be worth more dead. Dead, she could be sold as a ‘ghost bride’ to the family of a recently-deceased bachelor to accompany him as a wife in the next world. And so he murdered her and sold her for a nice 400 dollar profit.

· ‘Ethnic Minority’ – or, as we might also call you, a colonized captive, a slave in your own country, a victim. You’re from Tibet? From Xinjiang? Best to dig a hole and bury your culture in it, for your Chinese overlords won’t let you embrace it – expect to parade you in your national costume at the big Party pow-wows, poor performing bear that you are. Want to learn your own language in school? Want to know the true history of your country? Then bend over for a good CPC shafting. Your country is occupied territory held by force, by might, by anger, a tracked and stretchmarked body, the big pain that leaves you raw, like opened ground. Don’t ever forget it.

· The environment. Ah, now you, dear darling environment, are getting the biggest shafting of all. No wine and roses for you, just straight up against the wall fucked. Oh, did you think the sweet words from Beijing were true? That whispered seduction of ‘In 2006 we’re going to reduce energy consumption per unit of GDP by 4%?’ So naïve of you! It’s the oldest line of all – ‘I care’ - and you fell for it! How did you feel the morning after when you realized consumption increased? How did you feel about those 12 billion tonnes of industrial waste water just in the first half of last year? 70% of your rivers and lakes polluted? But I suppose you must be used to it, ranking 100^th out of 118 developing countries in terms of environmental care.

· A hooker. Now you might think you were getting fucked enough already, what with having to screw any guy with a handful of loose change and bored with his wife. But not so; if you were a hooker in Shenzhen, for example, you recently got fucked good some more when the police rounded a bunch of you up and paraded you in public, reading out your names over loudspeakers.

· A religious believer. Now, sure, if you believe in god you’re deluded. But if your lunatic delusion is of the christian flavor, and prompts you to get together your own religious gathering outside a state-sanctioned church then you’ll better break out the KY and condoms, since you’re going to get it good. As, for example, the nine priests arrested recently for having the temerity to pray in a place that had not been designated as a church by the government. But better to embrace the absurdities of christianity rather than those of falun gong. If you adhere to that particular brand of lunacy, then you can look forward to arrest, a good beating, and then disappearing from site. And that’s just the beginning, that’s just the foreplay. What comes next? Having your organs removed in an army hospital to be sold to the highest bidder, that’s what. China, say thank-you to Japan, say thank-you to Unit 731. They taught you a good lesson, huh? What an eager pupil you prove to be!

· Countryside resident. China has 900 million people in its countryside. Ninety percent of them lack adequate pensions and healthcare. Get this: a survey across China’s provinces found that nearly 70% of elderly people had just one set of clothes. Countrywide, also, only 25% of China’s workers are covered by a pension plan. Best to die before you retire – or else you’ll be fucked by the double whammy of poverty and the neglect of your kids as they zip off to the city to worship the god cash. And yet there are billions of dollars for the vain frippery of putting men in space, billions for the useless expo, billions for the shiny high speed train in Shanghai that doesn’t even work properly and billions upon billions for the army. Yes, China is so enamored of fucking its people that it would rather buy more guns and bombs than a change of clothes for its elderly.

· A journalist – But of course! The greatest enemy in China is the truth, so you guys are in for a particularly good fucking. Still, you’ll have plenty of company – China’s had the highest number of journalists in prison in the world for the last eight years in a row. You deserve it, of course, you journalists. Trying to tell the truth, what arrogance! How foolish of you to think your nation cared about such a trivial matter. And maybe prison is lucky, for you could get fucked as good as reporter Lan Chongzheng, who was beaten to death for asking too many questions about unsafe mines.

· A doctor with a conscience. Consider Doctor Gao Yijie. Under surveillance. Under house arrest. Monitored. Watched. Harassed. Why? Because she showed concern for China’s AIDS patients, many tens of thousands of whom contracted HIV (and thousands more Hepatitis) from blood-selling in the 1990s. What happened? Poor farmers were urged to take part in a scheme where they gave a pint of blood, useful ingredients were extracted, and a pint was put back in. But that returned pint came from the common stock, jumbled in the common box, which was not screened. The result today? Henan Province’s ‘ghost villages’ where most people have died. Consider this:- 300,000 infected with AIDS between 1994 and 1995 alone. The few who are still alive will be dead soon. How many officials or doctors have been punished for this? None. Only those who try to do something about it get fucked. Think of someone else, think of Wan Yanhai. He tried to speak up. Idiot. Bend over, Wan! How about ‘Snow Lotus’ an AIDS awareness group, funded by the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, whose members were harassed by police after they tried to act over 19 kids who had were expelled from school when it was found they had Hepatitis B?

· A blogger. Want to write something anonymously? No way. You have to register with your real name and details. Chinabounder? Oh, they don’t care about foreigners like me. I can do what I want. It’s China’s own people who get fucked by its government. The CPC doesn’t care about me; I am no captive, no prisoner, no helot. I get all the freedom I want in China. It is the Chinese who are kept in ignorance by their wrathful, watchful, suspicious masters. Take Zhang Ming, who was dean of political sciences at Renmin University – was dean, until he was fired for suggesting on his blog that there was too much bureaucracy at the university, suggesting that those in power were appointed for their party connections instead of academic ability. You’d have thought that someone who had got as far as he had knew better than to tell the truth. But that’s how the fucking goes, that is why it is the Chinese who lack freedom in their own nation, kept shut in the dark. Shut in the dark as they increasingly are, as one by one the CPC switches off the lights of the internet. Blogspot, for example, was becoming something too free and truthful. Chinese people – horrors – were beginning to express themselves and – worse! – read the opinions of others, opinions that did not ‘stand where the Party stands’ (those are the words of Luo Gan, one of China’s most powerful men, on the nature of truth). The site is now blocked in China, many blogs far better than mine inaccessible to those lacking the tech skills to get round the great firewall. But so skilled is the government at the lies attendant on a skilful fucking that should you ask them about this they will tell you, ‘We do not censor the internet’ – and will tell it cool and calm, not a blink nor twitch. For they are the most practiced of liars.

· Migrant Worker. For you as for women, as for the environment, an Olympic style screwing beckons. Gold, Silver, Bronze, you’ll always get one. So many ways to get shafted here. What does it matter that you are the people more than any others who have built modern China? How about Wang Jianchang and Liu Yuanping who, when they asked to be paid their wages, were fired, taken to the police station, and put in hand and leg irons? And for women migrants there’s a double dose – 20% of you get fired as soon as you become pregnant.

· In need of financial help. Expect charity and kindness? Know what you’ll get instead? Only one percent of the ten million registered firms in China have ever donated to charity. Eighty percent of the China Charity Foundation’s revenues come from overseas, and just 20% from China. China, where the lucky few who own 80% of the country’s wealth contribute less than 15% of all monies donated to charity. China, whose charities get 0.05% of GDP. Even mean old Britain is better at 0.88% and the USA a shining example at 2.17%. Let’s put that another way. Per capita income in the US is 40 times higher than China – but donations to charity are 1000 times higher. Best not to be poor in China.

….think that is the end of the fucking? It is scarcely the beginning.

I’m not going to bore you with opinions about China this week. I’m going to shock you.

Question: Do Chinese women ever want to be treated like hookers? The old Western idea of being a mother to the children, a fabulous housekeeper and cook, and a hooker in the bedroom – is that true for Chinese women?

It not being wholly true that I am an English teacher, business has taken me out of China to another Asian nation. Naturally I will not mention which one, though those who know it will no doubt recognize the venue.

Now of course I cannot go into the touristy shtick, and besides there are a thousand other blogs giving that side of the country, its temples and markets, its past and present. And so I will move straight to the matter -- which is that, in the lobby of the hotel where I’m staying, a few days back, I see a woman walk through, dressed in a straight black business suit, walking with power in her stride.

Oh, yes, the business suit, formal wear; an obvious fantasy, but potent for all that. After all, what man in his right mind would not want to fuck every single one of the black booted, red mini-skirted, red-jacketed women’s brigades that goose-stepped their way through China’s celebrations last national day? Ah, uniforms, clothes as badges, yes, there’s sexy. But in addition to the default sexiness of her clothes, what I also see is how she herself also exudes sex, magnetism, potential – to me.

I knew there was a small Chinese trade delegation staying at the hotel, selling some Chinese tech product, and I assumed she was part of it, even as she turned – hell, whipped, snapped -- my head. I had to follow her. In a city full of sexy women of another culture it was the Chinese woman who brought me to stiff attention.

She turns, makes eye contact, and so I immediately speak Chinese to her. This is a shock – a Western person in a foreign country speaking Chinese! ‘Where are you from?’ I ask.

‘Shanghai’ she says, and so, using my meager stock of Shanghainese I fire question after question at her. With the courage of a man on the make – something that most Chinese men would not have – I ask all I want to know. Are you alone? Are you married? Are you here with a boyfriend?

She was astounded, shocked. But was she caught?

My questions came too fast for her to evade or avoid them, and so I got all the answers I wanted including, to my final question – ‘Do you speak English?’ -- a ‘Yes.’

‘I want to have dinner with you’ I tell her. Her eyes widen.

‘I can’t. I’m busy tonight.’

‘Ok, then lunch.’

‘No time...’

But then it’s my turn to be astonished. ‘I have an hour at about 3 o’clock. Coffee? Meet me in the lobby?’

‘Sure,’ I reply, marveling at the confidence she shows.

And then she turns and continues to her meeting.

Three p.m., I’m waiting, having found a secluded table. She comes in a little later, pissed at her colleagues – ‘These guys are so in love with the sound of their own voices’ – and a little nervous too, I can see by her slightly too-quick gestures, the heightened tone to her voice.

So we settle down to get to know each other. Having snared her so far, there’s now no need to rush, and so I begin with the usual chit chat questions, stalking her through her replies, her body language. She’s a middle manager in some thrusting tech firm in Shanghai, a computer science graduate of such and such a university. Her official duties wrap up today, she says, which is why she is so busy. The rest of the group is heading back to China, and she’s arranged to stay on a few more days to tour the city and shop. How unusually independent!

But she’s a woman of surprises, and it’s she who brings sex to the conversation first. Well, truly, the whole conversation is nothing but sex, this entire meeting is about sex. But she’s the one who makes the implicit explicit.

She tells me she’s about to quit the firm.

Why?

Because, she says, she cannot get ahead. She tells me most of the staff there are guys and this makes it impossible for her. If she gets promoted over the men in her team, then the whole office will be alive with gossip that she fucked her way there. Not that she uses the work ‘fucked’ of course, but rather, ‘My boss just cannot promote me since he knows if he does everyone will assume I slept with him.’

Of course that’s what I want her to do with me, but naturally I do not say it, instead making the requisite remarks about what scumbags Chinese businessmen can be.

Busy woman that she is, she only has half an hour or so, and so as our time ticks out I take the gamble. ‘So you’ll be here on your own tomorrow?’

‘Yes, I told you.’

‘Then I want you to spend the day with me.’

A moment of hesitation clouds across her expression, so I press on. ‘I think you want to. Say yes.’

And she says yes.

But I am not done yet. This woman intrigues me, I see hidden fires in her that I flatter myself I can bring to the surface. I want to explore her, and I want her to explore her. And so I double down, increasing my bet.

Leaning close, I whisper into her ear, ‘But I have a condition… when you come tomorrow, don’t wear a bra.’

She’s shocked by this. ‘Wha – what?’

‘You heard me. No bra. I want to be able to touch you.’

And right then her phone buzzes with a text message, her boss wanting her back; and so she must go, the question unanswered, still reverberating through her mind in raw shock.

But I know this is a make or break bet. If she obeys me, comes the next day braless, then we will be lovers. If she does not, we won’t. That night I lie in bed, thinking it over, playing out strategies, scenarios, seductions. Calculating the odds.

And the next day?

We meet where we have agreed, and I can tell by the mixed shame and excitement on her face that she has done what I asked. I slide my hand high around her back feeling for the lack of bra and, satisfied, kiss her on the cheek, whispering in her ear, ‘Beautiful. Thank

you.’

And so we do the regular thing, the temple, the market, the tiger park, all that.

I know this is not what you want to read. You want the end of the day, not its beginning, its middle, none of its touches and pauses, testings and probings.

But it turns out I have unleashed something I did not expect for, towards the end of this day, things take a turn I had not foreseen. As, over dinner, I tell her she is coming home with me, she says –

‘Yes – I know – I am – but – but-’

‘What?’

‘I want you to pretend I am a prostitute. I want to be a prostitute for you, like the other girls in the city.’

Now this is new. Really new. Shockingly new. My acquaintance with the good women of China is rather extensive, but I have not come across anything like this. It is my turn to be stunned now. For a moment, I am speechless – and indeed so taken aback am I that I lapse into a rare moment of honesty.

She explains more. ‘This city is full of hookers – it’s Asia’s sex capital’ (she’s right there) ‘yet with all these sexy women available, you chose me… but I want to know what it is like to be one of them, I want you to treat me like that…’

‘But I do not know quite how… I have never been with a hooker before…’

That’s all I say before I say to myself, What the fuck are you saying?, and so I finish up, ‘…but, sure, yes, if that’s what you want, that’s what we’ll do.’

And so we go up to my room, riding the elevator with both tension and expectation in the air as I decide how to play out her fantasy. How would it be if she was a hooker, I wonder – what would I do?

Yet after all, the equation is simple. A hooker is but a toy, a plaything, a servant; she does what the guy wants and pretends to like it. And he, I guess, cares only for his pleasure and none for hers. So this is the attitude I take, using her solely for my desires, first kissing her, exploring her body with my hands, her breasts naked beneath her top, kissing her with more passion and urgency and then undressing her, slipping her jacket from her shoulders and letting it fall to the floor, slipping her top up over her head… push her to the bed and kiss her here, there, lower to her skirt, unslip the clasp, toss it aside, to see – ah, rare woman! – sexy panties, a perfect choice, creamy-white lace and satin combined, stimulating, maddening, fragrant. Momentarily I wonder if I should rip them off her before deciding that is a scene too obviously from a porn flick (and reckoning besides that slight as they are they will not rip so easily) and so I just take them off the normal way.

‘Talk to me, talk dirty, tell me what I am, what you want to do to me’ she gasps as I go down on her, and so I do. Talk all out of a bad blue novel, a third-rate stroke-story, sure, sexy this and fucking that and oh yeah babe, but it works its purpose, each illicit word from my mouth notching her higher. Her reaction turns me on even more, and as my desire grows deeper I let myself get wrapped in the fantasy, treating her like so much bought goods, entering her with a sudden thrust that makes her yelp, pushing deep inside, grabbing her legs and lifting them higher, deepening my angle of attack; and then flip her over, come from the side, and behind, tell her to come on top, to get on all fours, to suck me, fuck me, harder, faster, quicker, deeper, louder, messier, telling her to talk dirty, telling her to say how it feels, to say how much she likes fucking, that she is my whore; and each forbidden word out of her mouth, each feeling and desire that would not be permitted back home drives her to heights upon heights, until riding me, my finger on her, myself inside her, she comes, comes, comes; and now lost in it myself, the closing scenes of a hundred porn flicks in my mind, I let my own orgasm rise. She’s still in the throes of hers, and I grab ahold of her, as she rides on top of me, roll her down towards the bed, still inside her (not such an easy technique, but one that with enough women to practice on is not so hard to learn), and, after few fast thrusts withdraw from her and, she all this while still gasping through her climax, I come on her breasts, her face.

‘Oh yes, yes, yes yes yes, do it on me, do it’ she cries, captive in the fantasy driving her, half disbelieving it is really happening, both outraged and excited. It is intense for me too, since I have never treated a woman in this way before (save in my mind) and I gasp and roar, until I am done, whereupon I collapse on the bed beside her, my mind a perfect, contented blank, sunk in what has just happened…

As she is too; and so we lie there dazed, dazzled a few minutes, slowly slipping back to normality. The first thing she says is, of course, ‘Tissue… tissue..’ and so I toss her a handful from the bedside table. Having wiped her face, body clean she says, ‘That was.. that was…’ but has no words for it; and, I feel, as the fantasy cools and shrinks, she starts to see it a little differently, to feel some regret for what she let herself become, for the inner self she showed.

And so she decides to go – showers, on her own, dresses, on her own, and makes to leave.

But the surprises are not over yet.

‘I have a question,’ she says. ‘How much would you pay me if I was a prostitute?’

‘Nothing’ I say.

Boom, just like that, anger, fury, the spoiled Shanghai princess protesting…

‘What? You would not pay me anything?

I say, ‘I told you, I don’t use prostitutes.’

‘But if… if..’ she cries, starting to vent the anger rising in her.

‘Still nothing’ I say.

‘Fuck you’ she says.

‘I did’ I reply.

A silence prickles around us.

I can see she’s deciding what to do – hit me? Yell at me some more? Turn away and stamp out?

Finally she says, ‘You foreigners always wish to take advantage of Chinese people, in China or abroad.’

She might as well have hit me. In an instant I am back in China apologizing for all the wrongs China has suffered, imperialists, invasions, massacres, burnings and lootings, hell, even the value of the yuan.

She glares at me one more time. Whirls away.

And she’s gone.

Shanghai women.

Love them or hate them.

Fantastic.

The Huaihai Road Starbucks was, as usual, sprinkled with a few beautiful women, in ones and twos, some with guys and a couple of those guys hip and stylish too; and so from the woman dressed in the black and gold cashmere top and slinky purple dress and the student with the wet kiss-me lipstick, the bold, gold notice-me earrings and the long, soft white sinuous leather fuck-me boots to the wanna-be super model in her shades and false fingernails, cultivating an air of detached boredom while talking into her phone, I was spoiled for choice, as guys like me (which is any guy with an ounce of gumption and slack morality) always are in this city.

Now there are a number of simple ways to initiate contact in such a situation, but talking Chinese into a mobile will do it best. Chinese people are still surprised when a foreigner can use their language (just like they are often absurdly surprised when a foreigner can use chopsticks, or has heard of any city other than Shanghai or Beijing, or can point to, say, Liaoning Province on a map). And so doing this will lead to that moment of surprised eye contact that allows one to make an introduction gracefully. The ultimate variation on this theme is to talk Shanghainese into my handset. Doing that is so jaw-droppingly unbelievable to Shanghai locals (for if many Chinese are proud of their culture and routinely believe foreigners simply cannot understand it, the Shanghainese are pride upon pride and have trouble enough believing Chinese from other cities can understand their dialect, let alone foreigners) that most often the Shanghai girl in earshot will introduce herself to me on hearing her language in my mouth.

Of course, one does not really need the subterfuge, for just being foreign and confident is quite enough of a ticket to walk up to a woman and get to know her after making even random eye contact. And so I made my selection – the woman sitting in a corner armchair whose attitude, posture and location seemed promising, made eye contact, and walked over to make my introduction.

Being a Shanghai Woman, she was of course unfazed by my approach, inviting me to sit down with a spark of mirth and interest in her eyes. And so we got to know each other – an easy trick to do, just taking interest in her life, who she was, what she did, and answering her questions about me, more or less truthfully. Her name was Kay (Kay the Coffee Shop Girl, in my little black book), and as we relaxed into each other, our body language became looser, freer, more intimate – she’d lean forward to talk to me, our legs and arms would touch, eyes meet, our hands still doing the little dance that hands do before they finally rest with each other. The pauses in what we said were every bit as meaningful as the words themselves…Talked for an hour, shared another coffee, talked some more.

Finally I moved in for the kill.

‘So what are your plans tonight?’ I asked.

‘What are yours?’ she parried. But surely she knew what my plans were. Bed, sure, passion, pleasure – but not straight to bed, for that’s no fun. I wanted the chase to last a bit longer, so I suggested dinner.

‘Do you know somewhere nice?’ she said.

Do I know somewhere nice? But of course. I took her to a great restaurant near the coffee shop, on Xinle Lu, a French place. Now in the general run of things, Chinese food is the world’s greatest and most diverse cuisine, but sometimes it’s pleasant to make a change – and all the more so given the great lamb this place does and the fantastic Chasse-Spleen 1988 they serve; and even better than this, they have dining alcoves which provide just the seclusion for the intimacy I was looking for.

The meal done, the wine drunk (by both of us – unusual, this, for a lot of Shanghainese women do not care for alcohol – but beneficial to my purpose since it relaxed and excited her) and sitting next to each other on the sofa seat, we shared yet more coffee and desert and, our body language now sparking and crackling, we moved closer… closer… and then my lips on hers, a kiss, from which she pulls away, then to return and kiss me more. I slide my arm around the backrest of the sofa, around her body, my lips on hers once again and let fall my hand to her breast. A sharp intake of breath from her as I touch her, perhaps a little too soon, but she presses against me, murmurs into my mouth, and I am pretty sure I will be taking her home with me this night.

But challenging this thought she breaks away from me – ‘No... no, I can’t, I like you, I do, I like you – but I have a boyfriend – I have to – want to – I can’t, it’s too much... it’s hard enough as it is.’

No man will give up easily when he has got so far and so I moved to kiss her again. What should I care about some other guy? She was with me, here, now, accepting and returning my kisses, caresses ‘No –really – I cannot, I must not, he is important to me…’

But considering the ‘No’ factor, a man should not move any step beyond a refusal that is sincere and so I smiled, defused the tension in the situation, kissed her cheek and said, ‘That is fine, don’t worry, there is no pressure at all.’ I suggested another coffee, and an Armagnac, and slid reluctantly a few inches out of body contact with her.

‘So what’s hard about it?’ I asked. She explained that her boyfriend was an African guy, a black African guy. I was shocked by this. I had never met a Chinese girl with a black boyfriend. My interest turned from sex to survey. On the streets of Shanghai I had occasionally seen black guys and Chinese chicks walking together. It always piqued my interest.

She told me that her parents, her aunts and uncles, cousins and ‘friends’ not only could not understand her choice, but also urged her to dump the guy. ‘Of course I knew that when I got together with him,’ she said. ‘That’s why for the first six months of our relationship I did not tell anyone about him. No one ever says it, but the fact is Chinese people look down on black people… sure, they will deny it to your face, but I know it is true.’

‘So what happened after six months?’ I asked.

She bowed her head thinking carefully, and then said, ‘I saw that I was being unfair to him. He was the guy I chose, and why should I hide that? I thought they loved me. I could do what I want. But my parents were enraged about it, as I feared they would be – well, they are typical ‘old China’ and if I did not marry a ‘nice Chinese boy’ before I was 24 or 25 they would be horrified. I had hoped my friends would understand me. But they didn’t, not one of them….’

She told me her boyfriend was studying here at university, and that he was a sportsman, apparently a good one, with a shot at joining his country’s Olympic team (I will not say what country: I cannot always tell the absolute truth), and that he had gone back home for training. This made it more clear why she responded to me; in part she was just a bit lonely, but there was certainly more to it than that. Pressured by her family, friends and society she was buckling, weakening – for who can stand up to the endless (and inaccurate) boast of ‘We have 5000 years of history and this is what we expect you to do’? Bored (so she said) by the limitations of the Chinese guys she had dated, I was the more socially acceptable cross-cultural relationship. In China, her athlete was not.

In other circumstances I would have made another attempt to persuade her to come home with me. I could have done it, I know. But not now; this woman was a revolutionary enough already, having a black boyfriend. There was simply no way I was going to mess that up for her. Playing the devil’s advocate I wanted her to keep the boyfriend, to marry him, to challenge traditional Chinese thinking of color limitations. Perhaps selfishly, I wanted to use her as my own little revolutionary soldier against Chinese racial imperialism.

Immediately China’s recent involvement with Africa flashed through my mind, the almost daily pictures of political heavyweights visiting downtrodden, economically needy African states.

Jin Yuanpu, Director of the Humanistic Olympic Studies Center (HOSC) says, ‘The Western world has to remember what the Chinese have been through in the last one hundred years of misery.’

I wonder if China will remember the last 200, 300, years of misery Africa has been through? Remember a hundred years of Chinese misery? I say, Why? Should the Olympic traditions of almost 3000 years and what Pierre de Coubertin did take second place to China’s overwrought sense of suffering, in large part self-inflicted? Is the Olympic games a sporting event or a historical equalizer?

It crossed my mind how the Chinese workers in Africa satisfy their sexual frustrations. It left me wondering whether they put their frustrations to hand, or do they put money in the hands of less fortunate black women to satisfy their urges? I assume, of course, that they have such urges, spending many months away in hot climates in foreign countries.

Jin Yuanpu says the Olympic Games will be a chance to present to the world an accurate picture of China rather than the ‘preconceptions’ constructed by the ‘distortions’ of the foreign media.

Precious.

Let’s think about the Chinese media’s distortion regarding one of their sporting prodigies.

Zhou Mengmeng, a rising pool star, rejected the affections of her boyfriend, a fellow pool prodigy, whereupon he reportedly harassed and beat her. Her protests were gagged and dismissed, according to her father Zhou Ruixin, who recently spoke out about the shabby treatment she had received. He also leveled charges of corruption against games officials who, he said, had inflated expenses to siphon off thousands of dollars into their own pockets.

Jin Yuanpu says, ‘The world gives us 15 days, we will give it 5000 years.’ I say, Of what?

I think ahead to those 15 days and the young athletes who will come here to compete – strong, confident, at the top of their game, toned and muscled, lithe and focused. And human, very human. What will happen when other nations’ sports heroes in the Olympics of 2008 fantasize, fancy and lust after tall sexy, female Chinese volleyball players, petite, shapely Chinese divers, well muscled and toned Chinese tennis players, and lean, supple Chinese swimmers? What will happen (should China live up to her claims that she will let her sports stars be people, not machines) when a diver’s skin meets the muscle of a basketball player? When flexibility of gymnast meets strength of weight lifter? Sex? Terrible!

Jin Yuanpu says, ‘It is very clear Chinese culture cannot be Westernized or replaced.’

I say, Which culture? The culture that gags this woman for standing up for her rights? The culture that, in preparation for the Olympics, will sweep the ‘undesirables’ from the street and pour billions of dollars into two weeks glorifying China while millions of her people still live in hunger, disease and ignorance? This blustery culture of pride that is already heavily Westernized? The culture that looks up to White and down to Brown and Black?

Thankfully it’s very clear that Western culture cannot be Sinicized or replaced, the Olympics being from Greece, the motherland of democracy.

I imagine how life is for Coffee Shop Girl. The fear she feels how, when she is with her boyfriend, she will be discovered by parents or friends. But the ultimate shock of being caught in a sensual embrace must terrify such a couple – being caught by family and friends, or, worse, I see them in a hotel somewhere, snitched on by the inquisitive, judgmental and watchful staff, the police at the door, opening it with the pass key, stealthy, quiet, to see her and him locked together on the bed, into each other, expressing their passion, their human needs and desires, loves and lusts; and the cops, unable to mentally process it, grabbing him, hauling him off the bed, cursing words of spite and contempt at her, traitor to China, slut, whore, and bundling him off to the station.

And what of the other side of the coin, where a small handful of local currency in some African nation must bring satisfied smiles and derisive gales of laughter from sexually satiated Chinese workers adding their own sexual imperialism to China’s mercantile imperialism?

Jin Yuanpu says, ‘Westerners should come to China and see how people can complain and criticize the government.’

Well, they can certainly criticize Chinabounder. But let’s see how open they will be in their discussion of romantic liaisons between Chinese athletes and other sports stars when they are possibly exposed by one of the thousands of international reporters who will be scurrying for the latest hot flash at the world’s biggest sports meeting.

The International Olympic Committee has said it may allow for the first time Olympic athletes the chance to blog the 2008 Beijing games. Then I say let the Games’ sex blogs begin.

I wonder if China’s internet police will allow their own citizen athletes to read such blogs, let alone to post in order to search for their own true cultural identity through freedom of expression.

A warning – once you begin to peel back the covers of Chinese history in the last hundred years, you may find more terror than tradition, more cover-up than culture, and more mystery than the frequently appealed-to misery.

So there’s this new girl.

She’s quite the head turner. Young, vivacious, full of life, feminine fire to the masculine mud that is so common in China. Even though she’s expected to conform – for everyone must conform in this society – she finds little ways to be an individual – sometimes just her smile, that twist of the body, that sparkle in the eye that is her individuality; or maybe it’s the way she walks into a room, surrounded by people yet still all herself – or the way she answers a question, or asks one. It’s the way she rides her bike, whipping full of life between the more staid cyclists, up on the pavement, dodging between the lampposts. It’s the way she dances to her music, the way she drinks a cup of tea, the way she twirls a pen between her fingers.

From the first time you see her you know she’s special. She’s got that something, that spark of sass, of drive; it animates her, energizes her. She’s full of secrets and laughter, plans and hopes. Her presence fills a room and her absence empties it. She’s not someone you forget. I want to know her, know what her life is, who she is, how, what she thinks.

She’s young, and she’s got her life ahead of her. She’s not going to become a robot, not going to put up with the grind and the shit, with the third-rate university education China offers, with its meaningless lip service to ideas no one believes in. She’s not going to sit through Mao Zedong theory or learn about Hu Jintao’s trite, risible ‘Socialist Countryside’ (that a once great country comes to this!) She’s not going to wear the staid, dull regulation haircut her tutors will want, and she’s not going to get up at 6am in the morning to do their silly physical exercises and go to sleep at 11pm when they put the electricity off. She’s not going to be a good girl for them, quiet, polite, obedient.

Not her. Not for her the three or four years of rinkydink ‘higher’ education nor all the English tests; not for her the semi-slave labor as some prof’s lab flunkey, nor graduation in some cheap, gaudy robe, nor the kindergarten-style routine of the tassel on her mortarboard being moved from left to right. Nor, after that, the fuss and scrape of finding a job, and having to pick out the right clothes and style to make some dull potato of a Chinese guy offer her some shit job with shit wages in a shit firm, with a shit contract that says she must work as many hours overtime as she’s told and must not get pregnant. Not for her the causal abuses of her humanity that getting a job in China requires (for getting a job here is putting yourself on the slave auction block). Not for her putting up with the inept, bashful wooing of office colleagues, their fawning when they chase her and contempt when she declines, nor the constant drip of sexual harassment coded into the country’s DNA; and certainly not marriage to some passionless clod followed by decades of servitude and conformity.

None of this for her.

None of it.

None.

She’ll have no future, she’ll have no life, no chance, no joy, she’ll never grow and develop and explore her potential, what she could be.

Because she’s dead.

Her name was Zhang Yaoyi. She was 11. She was a pupil in a school in China’s central Hunan province.

I imagine her. I see her. She’s sitting at her desk and there’s that smile in her eye, that little wisp of steely will that marks her individuality. She says something to the teacher – Li Hengyi – just a little comment, just slightly too bright and certainly not servile enough, not docile, humble, as all good girls should be.

And then the lunacy that lurks beneath the male skin slithers to the surface.

He smashes her head against the desktop several times, hard, brutal; she falls to the floor. He kicks her, thick, heavy blows from his feet into her stomach, her ribcage. He jumps on her, kicks her head. Already she’s covered in blood and barely conscious. He grabs an iron bar that’s used to pull open the high windows and beats her with it, beats her, smashes her, bloody, murderous, brutal.

And now she’s totally still, blood spreading out over the floor, the soft slick spread of the puddle of red, teeth smashed, fingers broken. He picks her up –picks her up – and carries her to the window. Opens it. And throws her out. Four stories she falls; it kills her.

Dead. Gone. Erased.

And where were all you frothing lunatics then? Where were the witchhunts then? Where was the anger and the outrage? Where were the frenzied press reports? Where were the blog sites calling for this guy’s head?

One Western man has sex with a bunch of women. Women who are adults, who consent freely, and who enjoy it thoroughly. He writes about it, throws in a few run-of-the-mill opinions. Behavior nothing special. Thoughts little new.

Chaos. Millions of madmen fussing and strutting and firing off absurd emails.

Zhang Yaoyi beaten to death by her teacher – by her fucking teacher – and what? A story here, a story there. Page 4 of Shanghai Daily. Ignored by China Daily. A few reports in one day's papers, a smattering of interest from the lazy, idle, muzzled Chinese language press, none of it front page. And then silence.

Nothing much for a few days. More silence. Then a buried-away follow up report that Li Hengyi was mentally ill and thus would face no charges.

He’d been working at that school since 1998, and began to show signs of mental illness in 2001. Li Hengyi’s treatment, which came in late 2003, two years later, lasted two months and then he went right back into the classroom. That’s why he was still there in 2006 – despite it being perfectly well known he beat the kids – and that’s why Zhang Yaoyi died.

So where were you, you angry fuckers? Where were you then? Where was your outrage? Where were the letters to the press?

Silence from you all. I have in class many times raised the name Zhang Yaoyi, written it up on the board, in Chinese and so far not a single student has known the name. Not one!

Unbelievable? Not in China.

Another girl: Zheng Shaojuan.

Zheng Shaojuan was a second-grader, nine years old, in the village of Putian, in Fujian Province. Her teacher , Liang Liyu, sees her peeping at the deskmate’s answers in a math test, and so he – of course it is a he, it is always a he – grabs a broom handle and begins to beat her on her back. She starts sobbing, which enrages our fine, honorable teacher all the more and so he starts hitting her head, blow after blow after blow – all the while her brother, sitting in the row behind, is forced to watch this display of pig brutality. The girl tries to move her body forward, away from the rain of violence and this just adds fury to anger.

What! She tries to get away from him? He jabs the broomhandle into her, viciously rabid thrusts, trying to force her body round so that she will meet his eyes. For how dare she not look at him as he beats her? What disrespect!

And so frenzied are the blows, so great his brutal rage the broomstick snaps in two, splinters of it piercing even through the thick fabric of her school tracksuit and lacerating her skin. His wrath is purged and he’s taught her his lesson. Back to teaching he goes, full of pride at his display of good teaching methodology. Shaojuan spends the rest of the afternoon slumped on her desk. Later, another teacher walks by and sees this and she, having the decency the man did not, acts like a teacher (parent?) should, comes into the class to see what’s wrong with the girl. Shaojuan says she is not feeling well and the woman teacher suggests she goes home; she gets to her feet, shakily walks to the door, respectfully asks permission to leave from Liang, fighting down her shame and anger and contempt, leaves the classroom but collapses, right there, in the corridor, no strength in her body, her head fuzzy, unfocused. Liang carries on not giving a fuck and so the woman teacher helps Shaojuan home, carrying her part of the way.

An ambulance is called but this being China takes an hour to arrive; by that time another child has died in the Chinese educational system. By that time Shaojuan is dead.

And what of Yaoyi, whose bright future, whose hope and potential has been beaten to death, whose parents have been bought off for a mere US$25,000 and are now expected to shut up, seeking no further redress? And what of Shaojuan’s parents, who had gone to other provinces as migrant workers, leaving her with relatives? Of them I have found no trace; for they, being migrant workers, belong to that class of people who have built this country and who are routinely despised, belittled, cheated, abused and subsequently forgotten.

Where were you brave citizens of China then? Where was the anger? Where was the press, so like dogs baying for Chinabounder? The outcry? The mass of internet idiots so concerned about China’s honor and dignity? They offered silence and remain silent. Not a word, not a sigh, not a shrug of the shoulder, not even a raised eyebrow.

Here is an example of the anger I received just because I slept with a few women, just one of the ten thousand emails I got, from luckybulletinyourhead@yahoo.com:

Food, Wine, and Women

Food, you will be eating your own shit covered in shards of blood-stained metal.

Wine, you will be drinking your own blood while drowning in your own piss.

Women, the only bitch you had and will ever fuck is your mother's raw and bloody corpse.

I am supremely confident that you will enjoy the inhumane pleasure of being skinned and buried alive in a metal coffin fill to the top with sulfuric acid 6 feet under a stranger's grave.

Live everyday like your last, one day you will wake up in a bathtub full of ice with parts of your family all around you, I know you will enjoy the smell of dead corpses and you will definitely love to hear the black flies circling you while maggots crawl and burrow themselves under your skin.

It's springtime in Nottingham for me to watch your sadistic and pleasurable misfortune.

Shame on the citizens of China! Your children are dying and your silence is complicit in their death.