OK. It's time for a thread on gender, race, and journalist culture in Beijing, following the various explosions of late.
So, the gender dynamics of expatria as a whole are *fucked up* for a number of reasons apart from the normal bullshit of pervasive patriarchy
One core part of this is it's very, very easy for white men to get an exaggerated sense of their own attraction in China - less so today, but it's still a factor.
Then there's all the fetishization of Asian women by the West, in stark contrast to the demasculinazation of Asian men. This is one reason why white guys date Chinese women, but white women often aren't dating Chinese men in turn.
(I am simplifying huge and messy dynamics here and also leaving out the many non-white foreigners, partially because I'm less personally knowledgeable, but would welcome others to speak up on that)
Now, add into that that most foreign correspondents, traditionally, have been white men - partially because as @meifongwriter, @limlouisa and others have discussed, more qualified women and Asians were often passed over for this role
On top of *that*, news assistants - the Chinese colleagues with whom said correspondents have the most contact - tend to be overwhelmingly, though not exclusively, younger Chinese women.
This is because English and journalism departments in China are very, very heavily female (and the reasons for *that* are a whole another topic). News assistants are also undervalued, underpaid, and their opportunities for advancement limited.
So, a bunch of entitled white men, a bunch of younger Asian women in a directly subordinate position - and almost no oversight from HR at home.
Historically, then, I've seen news assistants all too often basically treated as a dating pool - even by married guys.
And the egos of older white male correspondents inflated - among a group who are not short of a natural sense of self-regard anyway. (Nobody has ever accused *me* of modesty, I assure you.)
This doesn't just produce fucked up personal relationships (and add to the resentment inside expatria, where there's also often a lack of solidarity between white and Asian women) - it also distorts journalists' sense of themselves.
It also means that most writing about sex in China - an important part of modern Chinese society - is bad; either weirdly and creepily eroticized, not addressed at all, or treated as entirely abusive when reality is more nuanced.
