Sexualities
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A Foreign Adventurer's Paradise? Interracial Sexuality and Alien Sexual
Capital in Reform Era Shanghai
James Farrer
Sexualities 2010 13: 69
DOI: 10.1177/1363460709352726
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Chinese Sexualities
Abstract Since the early 1980s western men have been coming to
China to work and live in coastal cities such as Shanghai, and
many have become involved in sexual relationships with Chinese
women. Using the framework of sexual capital and sexual fields,
this article examines the changes in the sexual status of white
western men in their relationships with Chinese women over the
past 30 years. A historical perspective shows how the political
economy of the interracial sexual field is conditioned by broader
changes in the economic and social status of foreigners in China.
Western men in China experience their foreign masculinity as
both empowering and marginalizing, a kind of ‘alien sexual
capital’ that is simultaneously exploitable but estranged. Chinese
women find that they can invest in specific forms of sexual capital
relevant to this field of interracial relationships, but also feel
alienated from social and sexual relations with Chinese men.
Despite some psychological stress, both for men and women,
sexual capital produced in this interracial field is convertible to
other forms of social and cultural capital relevant to life in the
global city.
Keywords alienation, China, interracial sexuality, nightlife, race,
sexual capital, Shanghai
James Farrer
Sophia University, Japan
A Foreign Adventurer’s Paradise?
Interracial Sexuality and Alien Sexual
Capital in Reform Era Shanghai
A ‘foreign adventurer’s paradise’
Shanghai. Jan. 20 – Woman in China enjoys the distinction of having escaped
the admiration of foreigners. Her praises are unsung in the verses of other lands;
she is not enshrined on the canvas of those whose ideals of outward being the
world has adopted; she has flashed no wit upon the page of romance or dazzled
it with her beauty. Everybody has agreed in letting her alone from the ankles
up, as though her only possible claim to consideration lay in cramped and
tortured feet. (Frederick W. Eddy The New York Times, 1901)
Sexualities http://sex.sagepub.com Copyright © The Author(s), 2010.
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Vol 13(1): 69–95 DOI: 10.1177/1363460709352726
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Sexualities 13(1)
Foreigners are often charmed by this kind of naivete and the lack of any public
display of sexuality. They applaud the absence of sex on television, and the
clothes that conceal every curve of the body, as a healthy sign. Some American
visitors have even hypothesized that the Chinese may have somehow conquered
their libidos by sublimating their desires in the good thoughts of Chairman
Mao. (Fox Butterfield The New York Times, 1980)
Sex is one of the allures of Shanghai . . . Here, the middle-aged overseas
Chinese can find willing youth, burly German mechanics can find little girls who
simply don’t exist at home, and nerdy western engineers can find girls so hot
their friends at home would laugh. (Ted C. Fishman, 2005: 29)
The Chinese wife of an American man in Shanghai joked, ‘Shanghai used
to be a foreign adventurer’s paradise, now you don’t have to be an
adventurer and you still are in a paradise’ (buyong maoxian jiushi leyuan).
In the context of the joke it was clear what she meant, that play was sexual
play and that for western men in Shanghai it is no longer risky or difficult
to enjoy this kind of play. However, as the foregoing journalistic
quotations show, her joke should not be taken as reflection of a timeless
romance between a feminized and sexualized China and a masculine West.
This article deals with the rapidly changing ‘ethnosexual frontier’ of
Chinese–western sexual encounters during the past 20 years. According
to Joan Nagel, ‘ethnosexual frontiers are sites where ethnicity is sexualized, and sexuality is racialized, ethnicized and nationalized’ (Nagel,
2003: 14). The frontier discussed here is that between the ‘western’ and
‘Chinese’ in Shanghai, a field of interactions similar to the ethnosexual
contact zones in other Asian international cities, such as Tokyo or Taipei
(Kelsky, 2001; Moskowitz, 2008). This article historicizes the production
of a social field of interracial relationships in contemporary China,
focusing on the historical processes productive of particular forms
of sexual capital, and also on some of the subjective consequences of
participation in this system of racialized sexual stratification.
Over the past 30 years, foreigners living in Shanghai have increased from
several hundred to several tens of thousands. Most, but not all of these
migrants are members of what Sklair calls the ‘transnational capitalist class’
(2001), skilled professionals from developed countries living in Shanghai
for periods ranging from 2 to as long as 30 years. Based on official Chinese
government statistics there were at least 130,000 foreigners living in
Shanghai in 2007 (not including Taiwanese and Hong Kong residents),
and based on consular estimates maybe as many as 300,000 in the city at
any one time (Lu, 2008: 273). Focusing on the British in China, Willis
and Yeoh (2002) describe the highly gendered and racialized nature of
expatriate social life. British men are much more likely to be posted abroad
than women, while British women are much more likely to be a trailing
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Farrer A Foreign Adventurer’s Paradise?
spouse. British men are much more likely to date Chinese women than
British women are to date Chinese men, while British women sometimes
see Chinese women as threats to marriages and relationships.
Race is very much an underexplored feature of Chinese sexuality, and
we must begin with a discussion of some of the terms. Racial categories
in Asia are not the same as racial categories in Britain or the USA. Terms
such as ‘white’ and ‘western’ do not have much currency in Shanghai.
Shanghainese (and foreigners in Shanghai) typically use the term ‘laowai’
(old foreigner) or more formally ‘foreigner’ (waiguoren) to describe white
foreigners in the city. Such terms are seldom used to describe people of
Chinese ancestry with foreign passports – who could be referred to as
‘ABC’S’ (American-born Chinese) or ‘huaqiao’ (overseas Chinese) or
more recently as ‘huayi’ (Chinese-origin). As Gamble writes: ‘in popular
representations, ‘foreigner’ was a term used primarily to describe
European, American or Australasian Caucasians. Thus the Japanese,
although strictly speaking ‘foreign’, did not fit the usual mental image of
the archetypical ‘foreigner’. (Gamble, 2003: 72; Massonet, 2000). Similarly Africans and overseas Africans, even those from wealthy ‘western’
countries were often referred to as ‘heiren’ (black people) rather than the
generic ‘waiguoren’. Shanghainese increasingly prefer the term ‘laowai’
(literally ‘old foreigner’) – as a kind of diminutive or familiar term for
‘foreigner’ – indicating a kind of growing sense of familiarity but also
perhaps some disdain for the racial others in their midst. Recently ‘laowai’
is used even in the state-owned media. (The Cantonese term ‘foreign
devil’ (guilao) is not frequently used in Shanghai. And it would be a
mistake to take categories from Hong Kong and apply them to the situation in Shanghai). There is a great deal of slippage in the meanings of
these terms, especially in the context of the multi-lingual ethno-sexual
frontier zones described here. To avoid constant repetition of the
Chinese terms, I will use the English term ‘westerner’ to represent the
local category of ‘waiguoren’/’laowai’, noting however that ‘foreigner’
might be a more direct translation and is often the term used in English
by westerners.
Westerners were only marginal participants in the general sexual
opening up (xingkaifang), or liberalization of sexual mores, that swept
China after the ‘reform and opening’ policies of 1978 (Evans, 1997; Li,
2003a; Pan, 1993, 1995). Beginning in the 1980s and spreading and
deepening in the 1990s a widespread ‘romantic revolution’ in China
extended a new legitimacy to premarital sexual intercourse as long as
relationships were based on romantic ‘feelings’ (Farrer, 2006). A more
limited legitimacy was extended to ‘extramarital love’, ‘one-night love’ or
even just ‘playing around’ without love (Farrer and Sun, 2003; Li,
2003b). Although foreigners may not have been very important in
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Sexualities 13(1)
instigating these changes, images of foreign sexuality and foreign ideas of
sexuality did play an important role (Schein, 1997). The popular narrative of ‘sexual opening up’ (xingkaifang) implies an opening up of China
to foreign sexual ideas (Farrer, 2002). Judith Farquhar describes a ‘newly
eroticized public landscape’ in 1980s China that included images of
sexualized foreign bodies and tales of foreign sexual prowess (Farquhar,
2002). In the international city of Shanghai this transnational erotic public
landscape developed a concrete local geography in the form of westernstyle nightlife zones. Beginning in the 1980s and 1990s, bars and discos
attracted Chinese with glamorous images of foreign eroticism and became
spaces where Chinese youth could engage in actual erotic encounters with
foreign visitors (Ah Yan, 1988; Farrer, 1999). With the increasing
numbers of foreign residents and tourists in the late 1990s, Shanghai’s
nightlife districts developed into full-fledged ethnosexual frontier zones in
which western expatriate professionals rubbed shoulders with Shanghainese white collars, Hong Kong entrepreneurs and tourists, as well as
many female Chinese sex workers (Field, 2008).
Some authors suggest that image of westerners and the West are
becoming less central to the imagination of Chinese sexual modernity,
with that role now occupied by cosmopolitan transnational Chinese themselves (Ong, 1999; Schein, 1997), sometimes invoking explicitly antiforeign nationalistic visions of Chinese modernity (Barmé, 1995).
Moreover, ethnic Chinese men from outside the borders of the PRC also
engage in their own transnational sexual practices in cities such as
Shanghai (Lang and Smart, 2002; Shen, 2005). As Louisa Schein writes,
the rigid and politicized divide between China and the West has been
confounded both by the ‘imaginary cosmopolitanism’ of PRC Chinese as
well as the transnational movements of the overseas Chinese who now are
living in increasing numbers within China (Schein, 1997). Nonetheless, I
suggest that the experiences of white western men in relationships
with Chinese women in Shanghai represent a very salient and important
ethnosexual frontier in Shanghai, one defined through a particular historical and social context as well as very specific local erotic imaginaries
(Moskowitz, 2008).
Interracial relationships are a site of transnational racial and sexual
politics. Asian women dating western men share a position on a shifting
ethnosexual frontier that is not always comfortable. Labeled derisively as
‘yellow cabs’ in Hawaii (Kelsky, 1996), ‘sarong party girls’ in Singapore,
pitiable ‘mail order brides’ in the West (Constable, 2003) and ‘nationselling traitors’ (maiguozei) in China itself, Asian women who date
western men often are met with popular derision or at least skepticism
about their motives. Policing the ‘white’ side of the ethnosexual frontier,
American journalist Sheridan Prasso’s book Asian Mystique criticizes
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Farrer A Foreign Adventurer’s Paradise?
western male fascination with Asian women, as an ‘Asian fetish’ and
‘yellow fever’, even equating an interest in Asian women’s bodies with
pedophilia (Prasso, 2005: 145–6). On the Chinese side, Shanghai
Academy of Social Sciences researcher Jiang Jiehai organized online mass
action against an anonymous white male blogger who posted an online
diary of his numerous affairs with Chinese women (Chinabounder, 2007).
Zhang called on ‘Chinese men with beating hearts’ to ‘chase out this
garbage foreigner’ (lajilaowai) (Zhang, 2006). Asian woman were not
simply passive recipients of this discourse of deviant interracial desire.
Young novelist Zhou Weihui’s accounts of her romances and affairs with
western men in Shanghai became a Chinese as well as an international best
seller (Wei Hui, 1999). In 2004 a 19-year-old Singaporean woman
created a humorous blog entitled ‘Sarong Party Girl’, in which she details
her adventures with western men and defended her interracial preferences
(Missizzy.org, 2004). Interracial sex in China thus remains an arena for
sexual politics, but we should not lose sight of this as an actual field of
personal sexual interactions.
In looking at internet courtship between US men and Philippine and
Chinese, Nicole Constable suggests that these men and women map out
their relationships on the basis of ‘transnational cartographies of desire’
(Constable, 2003: 28), constituting a field of imaginable and desirable
relationships. In an ethnographic study, Ilan Carmel found that young
Shanghai women perceive relationships with western men as a chance for
sexual and romantic experimentation outside the cultural frameworks of
Chinese dating relationships as well as an access point to transnational
cultural capital (Carmel, 2004). Transnational mobility was both an
attraction of dating foreign men and a potential problem, because many
women did not want to leave Shanghai. Women were not fixed in one
sexual-subject position. Individual women have access to multiple ethnosexual identities, ‘half-open-half-traditional’, ‘at heart a Chinese’ or
‘cosmopolitan Shanghainese’, which they could employ alternately
depending on the audience and their own needs (Carmel, 2004).
This article is limited in scope. I cannot address adequately the varied
motives of individual foreign men and Chinese women participating in
this contemporary interracial sexual scene, or the situations faced by gay
men, or Chinese men and foreign women in their interracial relationships
in Shanghai. The focus here is on heterosexual white western men and
PRC Chinese women living in Shanghai and how their embodied
experiences of interracial sexuality relate both to the changing status of
westerners in China in the reform era (from 1978 to 2008) and the
location of the interracial relationships in a changing field of desirable and
allowable relationships.
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Ethnographic methodology
This article is based largely on ethnographic interviews and observations
of western men living in China and their Chinese partners.1 Data used
here includes recorded ethnographic interviews and notes from conversations with 110 foreign men and 45 Chinese women I met during 12
trips to Shanghai from 1993 to 2008. Of these male informants, half were
from the USA, with the rest largely from Australia and Europe. Women
were local Shanghainese and women from other provinces living in
Shanghai. Together with these informants I attended nightlife venues,
parties and other social events in Shanghai. Popular fiction and media
clippings from both western and Chinese media were sampled for each
period covered in this article. As an American male who has spent
altogether nearly five years in Shanghai from 1993 to 2009, my experiences may also color these claims, but my long presence ‘in the field’ also
allowed me access and insight that I might not have had otherwise.
Unlike expatriate employees on short-term intra-company transfers, the
longer-term male residents I focus on here generally were running their
own businesses or hired ‘locally’ by a foreign or Chinese firm. A few were
on long-term postings with multinational firms. Some already were
married, mostly to Chinese wives, who usually worked in white-collar
jobs, or sometimes in jointly run businesses. The single men dated
Chinese women, and more rarely other foreign women. Chinese girlfriends were from all social strata, from movie actresses and daughters of
officials, to women working in low-paying jobs in the service industries.
Most Chinese wives were university graduates. Very few wives or girlfriends were from rural backgrounds, though some were from other
Chinese cities.
The political economy of interracial sexual capital
Sexualities are constructed in relation to economic and political categories
(Connell, 1995: 74), but sexual status is not simply a straightforward
reflection of economic status. Race is a central component of sexual status.
Gonzales and Rolison (2005) show that regardless of income US white
men enjoy higher levels of ‘sexual capital’ than black men, black women
and white women, allowing them more sexual opportunities and more
latitude for sexual experimentation (Gonzales and Rolison, 2005). In an
analysis of the sexual popularity of white men in Japan – in a time when
Japan was rich and many Japanese women earned more than their western
lovers – Karen Kelsky argues that the whiteness and western culture of
western men were ‘hegemonic constitutive elements’ of the freedom and
modernity that Japanese women longed for in general (Kelsky, 2001:
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Farrer A Foreign Adventurer’s Paradise?
148). This implies that western white men benefited from a racialized
construction of masculinity and sexuality at least somewhat independent
of their economic statuses. Similarly, Susan Koshy argues that Asian
women have gained ‘sexual capital’ in the West through glamorous
accounts of western male – Asian female sexual relationships situated in
Asian countries but produced by westerners (Koshy, 2004). Sexual capital
is thus racialized, but not reducible to status in other fields (such as
economics or politics).
The notion of interracial sexual capital allows us to theorize the idea
of a sexual stratification system, or a racialized and gendered sexual field,
as well as the strategies of individuals within this field. We can define a
sexual field as a field of possible sexual relationships structured by social
and political institutions as well as cultural and social boundaries to sexual
contact. Sexual capital refers to a person’s resources, competencies and
endowments that provide status as sexual agents within a field (Gonzales
and Rolison, 2005; Martin and George, 2006; Michael, 2004). Two
rather different conceptions of ‘sexual capital’ have been developed, a
sociological definition based on the Pierre Bourdieu’s idea of ‘fields’
(Gonzales and Rolison, 2005; Green, 2008; Koshy, 2004; Martin and
George, 2006) and an economistic definition based ultimately on the
‘human capital’ theory of Gary Becker (Michael, 2004). Both suggest that
sexual status is not reducible to other forms of status, and that a theory
of sexual stratification must explain the distribution of sexual statuses as
well as individual incentives to invest in sexual status. The sociological
theory of Bourdieu has the advantage that it represents how notions of
desirability and appropriate forms of desire are constructed within the
sexual field as opposed to being ‘naturally’ given outside of it (Martin and
George, 2006; Green, 2008). Bourdieu’s conception of ‘fields’ also allows
that one form of ‘capital’ may be convertible into another (economic into
sexual capital, for example). The advantages of the economistic or rational
choice approach, on the other hand, is that it explains how individuals
might rationally choose to invest in sexual capital (for instance, through
more attention to their appearance or acquiring new sexual skills), particularly when expectations increase for higher returns on sexual capital
(for instance with the liberalization of the sexual regime or when moving
to a new sexual environment). I build here upon the sociological approach
to sexual fields, while incorporating the insight that actors make
strategic choices about utilizing and accumulating sexual capital within a
historically constructed sexual field.
This article extends the trope of ‘sexual capital’ in a novel conceptual
direction through a focus on its political economy, represented through
the double entendre of ‘alien sexual capital’: in other words, sexual
resources that are alien, both in the sense of ‘foreign’ and racialized, but
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also ‘alienated’ in the potential for psychological and social estrangement.
This latter connotation is best represented through compulsive and
instrumental sexual activity, which, like alienated work under capitalism,
becomes ‘not the satisfaction of a need, [but] merely a means to satisfy a
need external to it’ (Marx, 1978 [1844], 88). Alienated sexuality may be
found even in the sexual activities of the people with a great deal of sexual
and economic resources. That is, surplus sexual capital may be empowering, but also alienating when it involves the routinized accumulation of
sexual ‘experiences’ as a fetishized currency. The extended meaning of
alienation developed is perhaps more Weberian than Marxian, the idea of
a means–ends rationality and routinized behavior becoming dominant in
sexual relationships. While any form of sexual capital may have this
alien(ated) quality, the apperception of alienation seems especially likely
in cases in which one’s own sexuality is perceived as ‘alien’ in the first sense
of the double entendre, that is as a racialized, gendered ‘otherness’. In
such interracial contexts one may be more likely to experience sexual
capital as simultaneously powerful but also as alien – as a thing both
belonging to oneself but also determined by an othering gaze.
Attention to the political economy of sexual capital implies a historical
development of the sexual field. It only becomes reasonable to speak of a
separate field of sexual capital when sex is an arena of life at least partly
autonomous from other social fields (Martin and George, 2006). In the
West in the 20th century, sexuality became a separate arena in which individuals could pursue relationships increasingly removed from economic
and status concerns associated with marriage (Giddens, 1992).2 The
globalization of sexual discourses can be interpreted as the globalization
of multiple transnational sexual fields (Altman, 2001; Nagel, 2003). I
suggest that with the ‘opening and reform’ period we also have the advent
of multiple increasingly autonomous fields of sexual relations in China, an
array of social spaces in which non-marital, particularly premarital, sexual
experiences are first imaginable and then legitimated (Farrer, 2002).
This proliferation of sexual fields is to some extent a product of the
transnational encounter with western sexual culture in the reform era
period. Foreigners were endowed with a high level of sexual capital
because of their embodiment of western ideas such as ‘romance’ and
‘sexiness’ and specific competencies such as ‘sexual skills’ and ‘sexual
knowledge’. However, as Ho and Tsang’s (2000) research on interracial
gay relationships in Hong Kong shows, racialized sexual hierarchies can
change significantly in a short period of time depending on shifts of
economic and cultural power (such as the handover of Hong Kong to
China in, 1997). This study situates the personal encounters of western
white men with Chinese women in the context of the neoliberal ‘opening
up’ of reform era Shanghai. The theoretical model predicts that the
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Farrer A Foreign Adventurer’s Paradise?
relative status of westerners will drop as Chinese invest in the same competencies and attributes that constitute these new forms of sexual capital.
Conceptually, this study interrogates the historical and social construction
of the ‘alien sexual capital’ of western men in Shanghai, as a historical
process, while also asking how this racialized sexual stratification system is
experienced at the intra-personal and interpersonal level. An important
ancillary question is the degree to which sexual capital aligns with other
forms of capital, particularly economic and social capital, and the terms of
‘convertibility’ from one form of capital to another.
The emergence of an interracial sexual field in
the 1980s
China was not widely perceived as a sexual playground for foreigners in
the 1980s. Avoiding sexual adventures with Chinese woman was standard
advice among young foreign men visiting China in the 1980s. Even as I
was preparing to enter a university in Shanghai in 1993, foreign men told
me they avoided casual affairs with Chinese classmates because of their
presumed sexual naivety and traditional notions that sex implied a
commitment to marriage. In the early 1980s, Chinese women who dated
foreign men could lose their jobs or university places, be banished to a
rural job posting or even be detained for ‘hooligan activities’. Sexual
contacts with foreigners were therefore not casual, and for most Chinese
women, they remained unimaginable. Throughout the 1980s and well
into the 1990s, Chinese language discussions of sexual relations between
western men and Chinese women were dominated by considerations of
spousal emigration and economic upward mobility. The assumption was
that Chinese women would marry foreigners in order to live in wealthy
foreign countries. Foreign husbands and wives were labeled ‘airplane
tickets’ or ‘passports’. Chinese print media reports in the 1980s and 1990s
described the mercenary motives Chinese women had for marrying
foreigners (Kong Mingzhu, 1996), problems dealing with parental opposition to international marriage (Pian Pian, 1988), adjustment problems
Chinese wives faced abroad (Chen Qiong, 1995; Jin Shan, 1988), and
the dangers of illegal agencies promoting international marriage for
emigration purposes (Cheng Xinmin, 1995). In popular cultural works
such as My Wife from America (Tang Yin, 1995) Shanghai women’s
strategies of emigration through international marriage were interpreted
a sign of a crisis of Chinese masculinity, and of Shanghainese masculinity
in particular (see also Zhong, 2000).
In my discussions with long-term foreign residents about the world of
dating and sex in China in the 1980s, two contrasting views emerge. One
is that interracial dating and sexual relationships were highly restricted and
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Sexualities 13(1)
hence rare. All social relations with Chinese were difficult because all
contacts with foreigners were monitored, and access to foreign living
quarters was restricted. This was especially true at universities, where
dating between foreign and local students could result in severe penalties,
even expulsion, for the local student. Nathan, an American who later
married a Chinese woman described the restrictive environment foreign
men faced dating Chinese women in the 1980s:
Back then I didn’t date any Chinese women. I just dated foreign women.
Actually, I wasn’t all that interested in Chinese women. I didn’t find them all
that attractive at first. And it was really not possible to date Chinese women. I
also saw how things went with my American friends, and I thought it was way
too much trouble to go through all that to be with a Chinese girl. It was illegal
for a Chinese person to come stay with you in a hotel or in any of the places
foreigners stayed. For instance, once I went away for two weeks and I lent my
apartment to this American guy. When I got back he wasn’t there. And I asked
what happened to him. He said that the police came in when he was there with
his girlfriend. They asked if they were married, and when they found out they
weren’t, they took them in to the police station and gave them a scolding. It
was so traumatic, that a week later he proposed to marry her. (Interview 15
August 2002)
In such contexts, short-term affairs were extremely risky for the woman,
and many dating relationships rushed on to marriage. In addition to
frequent encounters with the police, international couples in China had
to deal with the negative opinions about international dating prevalent at
the time. A German man living in Beijing in the mid 1980s described his
experiences with his local girlfriend:
It was very, very difficult to date a Chinese girl back then. Everywhere you went,
people would stare at you. They would look at you, and then they would look
at the girl up and down to see what kind of girl she was. Sometimes they would
say nasty things like she is a whore. If you went to a restaurant, the waitress
would be normal to you but would be very rude to her . . . Foreigners back
then would be really envious to see you with a Chinese girlfriend, like ‘how did
he do that’. How did he find a place to bonk her? Does he have inside connections? How can they keep this up without getting arrested? (Interview 28
August 2007)
On the other hand, some western men described the emergence of a
field of much more casual interracial relationships, particularly in the
newly arising nightlife scenes. One American businessman who lived in
Beijing in the early 1980s described cruising the Beijing Hotel in Beijing,
where the bar was frequented by the sons and daughters of high-ranked
cadres. He and a friend who was the son of an Arab diplomat would meet
women and then use their diplomatic car to sneak women into the foreign
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Farrer A Foreign Adventurer’s Paradise?
compound. Sometimes the women would stay over for a couple of days.
Most of these young women were themselves the daughters of government cadres and thus less worried about being caught than ordinary
woman with no political connections (interview 14 July 2005).
Ralph, an American who worked in Shanghai in the mid and late 1980s
described meeting women in the 1980s in the first small bars that opened
up near the Jinjiang and Hilton hotels in Shanghai:
It was not usually safe to take a woman back at night to the hotels where we
were living. We just had sex vertically in the alleyways or the bathrooms.
Someone would do it, and someone else would stand guard.
[I asked if it was difficult to have sex with these women.]
No. Back then they actually were naïve. It was like shooting fish in a barrel. They
had this naïve believe that if you had sex with them, then you would somehow
be attached to them . . . The girls were great. They were sexy and you could talk
to them, as long as you remembered that their maturity stopped at about the
eighth grade. That was true of guys back then, too. On the surface there was all
this machismo and bravado, but they really hadn’t grown up to beyond the
eighth grade. They had no experience. (Interview 12 November 2005)
Although stories of sex in public spaces may sound crude, they also reflect
the restrictions on interracial intimacy. For foreigners living in Shanghai
in the 1980s it was still not a simple matter to take women back to their
own residences. Thus many men, especially those more careful or considerate than Ralph, restricted their dating to other foreign women,
including western female exchange students. Significantly, many men I
interviewed reported not developing any sexual interest in Chinese
women until these restrictions were lifted, confining their interests to
expatriate women. For some men, however, clandestine sexual adventures
were one way in which they could challenge the closed and ‘difficult’
nature of Chinese society. Sex was a way to break social boundaries and
learn from their partners about the unofficial sides of Chinese life.
Only a small number of women participated in this intimidating interracial sexual field, but it offered many material and emotional enticements.
Even for the daughters of cadres, these clandestine affairs with foreign
men were a chance to access a new and previously forbidden world of
foreign goods available only to foreigners at ‘friendship stores’, luxurious
amenities such as hot showers in foreign hotels, and exotic environments
such as bars and foreign residential compounds. A voyeuristically detailed
Chinese magazine account of the new ‘bar’ (jiuba) scene in Shanghai
in the late 1980s, describes Shanghai women’s fascination with this
forbidden and expensive form of western consumer culture:
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Sexualities 13(1)
A bar? High society? The scene that appeared in my eyes was the lurid world of
red lights and green liquor I once saw in a movie. A strange sense of curiosity
welled up in my heart. Well, I’ll just have to go and see! (Ah Yan, 1988: 2)
In this article Shanghai women are portrayed as taking advantage of the
nascent international nightlife scene both to make money off foreigners
and learn about the new lifestyle of the ‘high society’. The sexual capital
of foreign men in this period seems inextricably tied to their cultural and
economic capital – the standards of consumption they could afford and
the worlds of consumer pleasure they could introduce within China’s
incipient nightlife scenes.
Outside of this small and disreputable nightlife scene Chinese women
had few chances to meet foreign men in the 1980s. Many college
campuses, for example, did not allow foreign students to attend university
sponsored dances. Several former women university students I interviewed
in the early 1990s were directly questioned by university officials about
their relationships with foreign students. One described this experience as
‘humiliating’. Another was fired from her job at a university for dating a
foreign student. Only those with economic and political capital dared to
act. For example, many of the women I knew who dated foreigners in the
early 1990s were daughters of military officials. In this heavily censured
sexual field, Chinese women’s sexual capital included a psychological
willingness to take risks and, for some, the political and social resources
to cope with potential consequences.
In sum, largely outside the conventional field of Chinese courtship, a
new risky field of sexual play was just emerging in China’s most open
cities, located in the transnational spaces of hotel bars and other foreign
enclaves that represented a tie to the exotic and erotic milieu of western
consumerism. Foreign men, and even more so, the Chinese women who
dated them were both adventurers, taking real risks, especially the women.
Foreign men monopolized relevant economic and transnational cultural
capital, and also had access to forms of sexual capital (experiences, ‘knowledge’, venues, techniques) that the Chinese were themselves coming to
desire and emulate. In this new transnational field of interracial recreational sex, most Chinese had not ‘gone beyond the eighth grade’, to
quote Ralph’s patronizing assessment. At the same time, some of the
Chinese women who were able to participate had forms of sexual and
social capital that were still tied to the political economy of socialism,
including personal ties to the party-state that foreign men also had little
understanding or appreciation for, but gave the women a limited measure
of sexual autonomy.
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The increasingly open and stratified urban
interracial sexual field after 2000
The social and sexual environment changed radically in the 1990s.
Chinese state agencies eased up on the regulation of non-marital sex
among Chinese as well as with foreigners. By 2000 most hotels no
longer asked to see a marriage certificate when a male and female guest
registered together. Work units stopped micro-managing the sexual
behavior of employees. Bosses generally refused to mediate even in cases
such as extra-marital affairs. Even many university administrators in
Shanghai began to turn a blind eye to the sexual behavior of students,
despite school rules against sexual intercourse (Farrer, 2006). Some of
these changes were the result of official policy changes, but much more
they were the result of the general ‘opening up’ of sexual culture in China
during the 1990s that changed official minds about the wisdom of strict
sexual controls (Li, 2003b). By 2005 European and American men
came to China already with a widely advertised sense of the sexual as well
as economic possibilities. Media reports celebrated the Chinese sexual
revolution in China. (cf. Fishman, 2005; Follath et al., 2002; Massonet,
2000 [1997]; Pomfret, 2003), and word of mouth accounts made it clear
that western men were free to participate. As journalist Ted Fishman
writes, ‘Sex does not bring as many foreigners to China as does money,
but it does nonetheless’ (Fishman, 2005: 30).
For the Chinese, interracial dating and sexuality also took on new more
positive meanings. A small publishing boom in personal accounts of international romance with titles such as My Berliner Lover, Your Golden Hair,
My Black Eyes, My Hawaiian Love Affair and I Went to Germany and
Became a Bride gave a more positive and romantic image of the Chinese
women’s motives for dating foreign men (e.g. Ah Ming, 2002; Gu Yan,
2001; Liang Jie, 2002; Xing Wei, 2000). Reaching a broader audience,
the award-wining Shanghai Broadcasting program ‘OK Xintiandi’
(1999–2005) described the rewards of international married life in the
city. A survey of residents in Beijing, Shanghai and Guangzhou found
generally positive attitudes toward international marriage. Out of the
Shanghai respondents, 38 per cent knew someone in an international
marriage, while one third of the single respondents expressed a willingness to marry a foreigner themselves if the right person emerged. (Beijing
Youth Daily, 2003). Still, marriages between foreigners and Chinese
remained roughly 9 to 1 in favor of Chinese women marrying foreign
men, constituting roughly 3 per cent of all marriage registered in the city
each year (Shanghai Statistical Yearbook, 2008).
In addition to changes in sexual culture there were changes in the
management of the foreign population. In the late 1990s most restrictions
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on foreigners’ residences were lifted. Foreigners could now rent apartments in areas that were mostly Chinese. Chinese could also purchase
apartments and houses in what had previously been foreign compounds.
Entertainment facilities were also integrated. Whereas hotel discos
catering to foreigners were separate and largely off-limits to ordinary
Chinese in the 1980s, the 1990s saw the integration of the foreign
and local clubbing and nightlife scenes. While westerners enjoyed an
especially high status in the nightlife in the 1990s, including free
admission to many large discotheques, by 2000, they were more or less
treated as social equals in a scene increasingly fragmented by music genre,
age and other taste cultures (Farrer, 2002; Field, 2008). Nightlife insiders,
such as club owners and deejays, were as likely to be Shanghainese as white
westerners or overseas Chinese.
Their greater integration into Chinese society and the reduction in their
relative economic and cultural capital had an enormous effect on the
sexual field experienced by westerners in China. First of all, the liberalization of sexual controls and the decreasing cultural and social distance
between foreigners and Chinese greatly increased the pool of potential
sexual and romantic partners. Foreign men no longer needed to worry
that Chinese women would demand marriage after a one-night stand or
that a sexual relationship with a foreigner would cost his partner her job
or land her in a police detention center. On the other hand, western men
were competing sexually with many more other foreign and also Chinese
men, who also had gained access to forms of cultural, social and economic
capital that westerners once seemingly monopolized. Shanghai men also
gained sexual capital, including a sense of ownership of the nightlife scene
in Shanghai and a confidence in their sexual knowledge and experience.
The condescending role of teacher and guide still informed some foreign
men’s interactions with Chinese women, but the same extreme gaps in
knowledge and resources no longer defined these interactions.
For the most part, western men and women I interviewed through
2008 still talked about Shanghai as a sexual paradise for western men. In
particular men found willing partners among the curious young women
fresh out of college and trying out the bars and discos for adventure.
Among westerners, dating Chinese women was seen as the best way for
men to get to know China and to learn Chinese. As a young American
man said to the audience during the taping of a television program
about international dating in China, ‘The only way to learn Chinese is
date Chinese girls’ (participant observation 28 October 2005). The
casual dating scene included ‘pick-up’ relationships in the bars and
clubs, but also increasingly online dating. This notion of sexual play now
included an idea that the women were playing as well, as one American
man explained:
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That is one of the reasons that I really prefer to meet girls in the nightclubs
because out in the clubbing scene it is really about ‘play’. I think that term really
encompasses what people mean in China by going out. If a girl is out in a club
she knows that it is just play, and she won’t expect to develop a long-term
relationship with anyone she meets there. (Interview 28 September 2005)
The conventional understanding of the nightlife scene as being about
‘play’ meant that men and woman understood that a sexual encounter
could be just ‘playing around’ or ‘one-night love’. The socially
constructed definition of these social spaces thus constructed the types of
relationships that were considered ‘normal’ within this sexual field.
Some men played the sexual field for years, some compulsively. When
I asked Carl, a single 40-year-old white American, if he got tired of dating
a different woman nearly every week, he replied sarcastically, ‘What? Get
tired of having sex with hot 21-year-old girls? Nooo . . .’ For him, as for
many men, the physical excitement associated with new sex partners
required no explanation, nor did the attractions of women in their early
20s. All men would want the same thing if they were honest, he said. He
spent several hours each day in online interactions with Asian women in
different countries where he traveled (interview 9 July 2005). Even
western men in their 60s or 70s found themselves able to date much
younger women in Shanghai. Sam, an Australian who ran a small
import–export business, said that sex was the main reason he stayed on
in China. Over 40 years, he had been married to four Chinese women
(all ‘still friends’), but now he was again single with no plans to remarry.
He said his entire social circle in Shanghai consisted of Chinese women.
‘I am 62, my girlfriends are 23, 24 [with the oldest 34]. Age to them is
insignificant – as long as you are a good guy and treat them well’ (Interview 16 September 2007). As for why they were interested in him, he
explained that many of his girlfriends had few connections in Shanghai,
and needed his help as much as he needed theirs, including financial help
and companionship. He also provided them with good sex, he bragged,
with the help of ‘Viagra’ tablets.
For many of these single male western sojourners in Shanghai,
western/white women completely dropped out of their field of possible
sexual partners, a fact the men attributed first of all to the ease of finding
a willing Chinese girlfriend. As premarital sexual relationships among
Chinese young people became more accepted, opportunities for shortterm, casual affairs with Chinese women also seemed to increase. Unlike
20 years before, desire for Chinese women was now a constitutive part of
the field of possible sexual relationships for most heterosexual foreign
men. In contrast, foreign women seemed to demand different tactics, and
became marginal within this explicitly interracial sexual field, or even
placed completely outside of the field of sexual vision for many men. Many
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single, white, western women I interviewed complained about their sexual
marginalization, or the lack of attention they received from both foreign
and Chinese men.3 From the point of view of western men I interviewed,
the sexual disgruntlement of western women in China became another
reason to avoid this type of dating relationship.
As their relative cultural, social and economic advantages relative to
Chinese men diminished, some western men seemed to define their
masculine identity largely in term of the surplus sexual capital displayed in
their numerous short-term affairs with Chinese women. Contrasting
themselves with the public stereotype of the Chinese businessman who
dated karaoke hostesses or paid-for mistresses, many western men insisted
that they were relying on their sexual charms, rather than their economic
capital in attracting Chinese women. ‘Picking up’ a stranger in a nightclub was an affirmation of masculinity, a way of accelerating returns on
foreign sexual capital in an ‘deflationary’ sexual field, in which their sexual
capital seemed to be declining in value.
As Chinese men grew wealthier, many perceived a decline in the relative
status of western men in Shanghai. One ethnic-Chinese businessman who
had worked in the Shanghai nightlife industry for many years said to me
while drinking in a Shanghai nightclub:
Now the city is just filling up with this white trash. These guys they come in here
and you can see them. They are all full of themselves, but they don’t have any
money. They are beer warmers. You go out to the bar and you see them holding
a beer for an hour. They will come in and dance with a girl, and if she won’t
agree to go home with them right then and there, they won’t even buy her a
drink. You ask these guys what they do and they say, ‘Oh, English teacher’. That
means what, that means they are doing nothing here, nothing. (Conversation
22 October 2005)
English teachers were the frequent targets of such comments about the
‘undeserved’ racial sexual capital of western men (as opposed to the more
‘normal’ association of masculine sexual capital with wealth and
professional success). Increasingly virulent complaints about foreign men’s
sexual activities with Chinese women could be found on Chinese blogs,
which were less subject to state control than mainstream media. The most
prominent incident involved a blog of a ‘foreign teacher’ (by some western
media accounts a hoax) bragging about his sexual exploits with Chinese
women (Chinabounder, 2007), and the call by a Shanghai-based academic
Zhang Jiehai to ‘uncover’ him (Zhang, 2006). Zhang’s research more
recently focuses on how Chinese men can learn to appeal to white women
(and why both foreign and Chinese women have such a negative
impression of Chinese men), an apparent attempt to adjust the balance of
masculine sexual capital between China and the West (Zhang, 2009).4
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Masculine sexual accumulation and sexual
alienation on the ethnosexual frontier
Participating in this interracial sexual field allowed the development of
specifically gendered forms of sexual capital, which also had gendered
subjective consequences. I would like to focus first on the experiences of
men. Many western men ‘played the field’ in order to enjoy sexual
pleasure, but also to enjoy the sensation of their own sexual attraction with
Chinese women – their sexual capital as foreigners. Therefore, western
men I interviewed said it was far less rewarding to ‘pay for sex’. In fact
many men spent almost no money on women they met. One German
informant Erik (age 50) I knew well in 2001 made a point of only meeting
women for drinks after dinnertime. Hanging out night after night at one
of Shanghai’s more popular clubs, he stayed occupied on two cell phones
– one used for round-the-clock currency trading and one for constant
dating. He also kept a spreadsheet with records of 150 sexual conquests
(mostly in China), including scores for sexual performance. Other men
found this practice bizarre, but the compulsive accumulation of sexual
experiences was not unusual – with his spreadsheet as a means of recording the otherwise ephemeral returns on his (by his own admission) fading
sexual capital.
As men ‘played’ this sexual field, they invested in various forms of sexual
capital specific to this field, spending time in certain night spots, accumulating the linguistic tricks of cross-cultural seduction, accumulating phone
numbers and honing their self-presentations in specific directions, in a
sense sexualizing themselves. At the same time, they found this masculine
sexual capital construed through the sexual strategies of Chinese women,
a dependence on an ‘othering’ gaze that caused some unease. One
young single American man who dated many Chinese girls described the
attractions of being a foreign man in terms of the often distorted and
contradictory stereotypes that Chinese women had about foreign men:
We benefit from the fact that all Chinese think we are very open . . . So a
Chinese girl may play very hard to get with a Chinese guy, but when she sees
a western guy, she will say, I am a conservative Chinese girl, but westerners are
open, so I guess I can do it with you. (Interview 22 April 2005)
Western men embodied and performed a heightened sense of sexualized
masculine self-identity through their sexual play with Chinese women;
however, the identity that these men were thus playing with, was that
of the ‘foreign’ man (laowai), a role that men often experienced as
alienating. Sexual relationships with Chinese women were a means
whereby foreign men accumulated and achieved returns on this performed
and embodied alien sexual capital. They could convert sexual capital into
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local social and cultural capital through speaking Chinese and connecting
socially with Chinese women, but the process entailed embodying an
identity as a foreigner that reinscribed their status as outsiders. Put simply,
many men suspected that their desirability was based on Chinese women’s
illusions, stereotypes and instrumental purposes regarding foreigners. (A
similar process of objectification as alien and exotic was described by some
Chinese women, but this has been discussed more in other studies, e.g.
Kelsky, 2001; Koshy, 2004.)
Nick, a psychotherapist working with the expatriate community in
Shanghai, suggests that foreign men experience stress in Shanghai that is
closely tied to their marginal situation as foreigners, but also to their
feelings of dependency on sexual partners (both long-term partners and
short-term sexual partners). Nick suggests that many men actually feel
‘emasculated’ in their relationships with Shanghai women, who are often
their primary attachment to Chinese society. Also, as expatriate managers
many men experience extraordinarily high levels of stress from pressures
to achieve success for their companies in a foreign environment. Faced
with stress in work and in long-term relationships, numerous short-term
affairs become a way of alleviating a sense of alienation or lack of control.
Nick explained:
Here I think it is addictive. I see a lot of people with a low grade addiction to
these kinds of things – prostitution and chasing women in the nightlife – but
it very related to escapism, to escaping from the very intense pressures people
find themselves in here, economically and work-wise . . . Essentially it is not
really talked about, but I think there is a lot of racism that goes on in China.
We are called laowais, which is supposed to be respectful, and waiguoren which
is supposedly respectful, but we are essentially outsiders, and we, the males are
asserting themselves in this kind of covert way, it is very desperate. It is primitive and desperate and empty and tragic. And if you talked to most of these
guys – apart from the real young-bloods – they don’t feel that good about it
. . . But it is a familiar pattern here. (Interview 5 February 2006)
Nick’s point here is that the sexual practices of some western men reveal
a compulsive desire to connect with and at the same time to remain
disconnected from their Chinese female partners – who are perceived as
potentially controlling, demanding and bewildering but also as a source
of social and cultural grounding in the local environment. Western men
thus find themselves reliant upon the affirmations of Chinese women who
may seem sexually compliant and available but also in the context of
Shanghai may also be more powerful, competent and autonomous
than the men themselves. Foreign sexual capital is thus empowering and
alienating at the same time.
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Chinese women’s investments in interracial sexual
capital
The sexual field of interracial dating in Shanghai formed for Chinese
women a set of sexual possibilities and new sexual norms that could be
described as an alternative sexual subculture. Crossing into this ethnosexual frontier zone represented for some women a conscious rebellion
against a mainstream Chinese dating culture that emphasized female
chastity and commitment to marriage (Farrer, 2002), and thus gave them
a greater sense of control over their own sexuality. Wendy, a 20-year-old
engineering undergraduate, when I first met her in 2002, is a case study
of the personal transformations involved in participation in this subculture
and the nature of investment in specialized sexual capital. In her last year
of college in 2001, she met her first foreign boyfriend by accident in a
shopping mall. After he returned to the USA, she began frequenting
Shanghai’s international bars with a group of female Shanghainese friends,
forming friendships with English-speaking foreigners (male and female),
and developing shared interests such as the US TV series ‘Sex and the City’.
For the most part they dated only western men, sometimes engaging in
casual sex, including experiments with ‘threesomes’ and ‘foursomes’, practices that would have been considered shocking or immoral to most of their
Chinese friends. Like many women I interviewed, she initially found these
various sexual experiences disorienting, a complete break from her preexisting moral categories (including the ideal of premarital virginity). Five
years later, she said with an air of both wistfulness and pride, ‘I guess I am
a completely different person now.’
After experiencing this subculture, many Chinese women described a
difficulty returning to Chinese dating practices. Wendy described how she
also tried dating Chinese men after breaking up with her second foreign
boyfriend, but found their attitude toward sexuality off-putting: ‘They
expect you to act like a virgin, and wait for like two months to have sex.
With a foreign guy you know you are going to do it, and it just happens.
It’s more natural’ (interview 15 September 2002). Over the years she
formed a complex social identity around her foreign cultural experiences,
both sexual and social. For four years, she lived with a Canadian man
nearly 30 years older, though continuing practices such as ‘threesomes’
with her boyfriend and other men and occasional secretive affairs. In her
case, foreign sexual capital and foreign cultural capital were built up in a
concerted fashion, with examples of capital convertibility working both
ways. Her English became near native, and she worked for a prestigious
foreign company. She had traveled to Europe several times for work and
pleasure. The couple stopped their practice of threesomes after he became
jealous of her involvement with a younger man he introduced to her as a
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threesome partner. Dealing with her boyfriend’s jealousy and unease were
part of the difficulties involved in dating a much older man, she said,
though she had no regrets about the polyamorous lifestyle. Uneasy about
the idea of marriage, she broke up with him. Going back to dating
Chinese men and living a conventional Shanghainese lifestyle were
impossible to imagine, she said, and she started seeing a young American
who had just arrived in Shanghai.
Although foreign men were no longer exotic or particularly wealthy in
comparison to Chinese men, many women attested to the continued
racial sexual capital of foreign men. Haiyan, a 20-year-old Shanghainese,
described her attractions to western men as partly physical. ‘I think they
are beautiful [piaoliang].’ Dina, a 21-year-old from Henan who was living
with a 44-year-old American, said that western men were better in bed:
In general, American men are more able to open themselves up than Chinese
men. They are wilder (ye) when it comes to sex. Actually, this is widely recognized, that western men are wilder than Chinese men. I think this is one reason
why girls go after foreign guys. They think they can give them sexual satisfaction.
(Interview 23 August 2002)
To some extent, dating foreign men remained a status symbol in
Shanghai. Vivienne from Northern China described this as a particular
Shanghainese mentality:
Most of my friends who have foreign boyfriends don’t necessarily keep them
very long. Some are just one-night stands. Some last a week . . . People have a
kind of desire to possess someone. I think I understand Shanghai pretty well,
right. They feel really proud if they have a white boyfriend. I don’t know why
they have this idea.
[Interviewer: why do they want to have one-night stands?]
They just want to conquer [zhengfu] a guy. Like ‘play around, I don’t care’. I
don’t care if I know him or not. Of course, some of these [relationships] are
closer than others. (Interview 5 September 2002)
As this quotation illustrates, racial stereotypes constructed white foreign
men as exotic conquests for women, which might be only for one night,
but might include ‘wild’ sex.
As in the 1980s, nightlife still played a big role in the attractions of a
foreign lifestyle in for young women Shanghai. Eve, a 19-year-old Shanghainese girlfriend of Wendy, described how she was attracted to the
foreign lifestyle of bars and house parties:
I don’t have many Chinese friends anymore. Most are westerners. One reason
is that I always go to bars, and Chinese people don’t usually go to bars. When
they do go, they aren’t any fun! I think foreigners are more fun.
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[Interviewer: Why’s that?]
Well, they’ve been more places, and they know more things, and when they talk
to you, you’ve learned more. If it’s people who’ve only stayed their whole lives
in Shanghai, they won’t know very much. (Interview 9 September 2003).
Foreign men’s sexual capital thus still derived in part from their access to
various forms of transnational cultural capital, including knowledge of the
ways of nightlife. These forms of cultural and sexual capital could then be
acquired and deployed by the women themselves.
Within this interracial subculture, short-term sexual affairs were
constructed as ‘fun’ and ‘normal’. Eve, for example, had sex with many of
the men she met. ‘I don’t think it’s a big deal to have sex. Maybe I’ve
watched too many foreign movies . . . Sometimes it’s just a need. It’s a
mutual need. Like, no one’s forcing you to do it, right?’ (interview 9
September 2003). Women such as Eve felt that within this field of interracial sexual play they were able to exercise their own sexual capital and
exercise sexual power in conquering foreign men while enjoying sexual
pleasure. As with all of the women quoted here, Eve imagined that
someday one of these sexual relationships would develop into a long-term
committed relationship (preferably with a western man). No women I
interviewed perceived ‘playing around’ as an end in itself or a permanent
lifestyle. Most hoped to marry western men, although some said they were
open-minded about race. In sum, the sexual field of short-term interracial
sexual play created possibilities of sexual fun and motivated investments in
sexual capital – ranging from a psychological capacity for polyamory to
knowledge of Shanghai’s nightspots, to tactics for finding a husband.
Conclusion: Western hypermasculinity and alien
sexual capital
When I mentioned Nick’s theory of the ‘emasculation’ of foreign men to
Marcia a female American academic working in Shanghai, she burst out
laughing. How could this be? Foreign men in Shanghai have a completely
overblown sense of their manhood, she said. ‘The city is full of ‘2–10s –
a two at home, but a ten in Shanghai’ (conversation 11 February 2005).
If anything, she said, foreign men in Shanghai exhibit a kind of ‘hypermasculinity’, an enlarged sense of themselves as men that stems from their
sexual popularity with local women. Nor would some informants agree
that Chinese women experience a sense of control in their relationships
with foreign men. Indeed it is better to see the interracial sexual field as
a highly complexly stratified space in which tactics, judgment and luck
also matter.
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I do suggest that Marcia’s diagnosis of ‘hypermasculinity’ (see also
Ling, 1999) and Nick’s diagnosis of emasculation are not as incompatible as they seem. The stories of Shanghai’s long-term foreign male
residents describe an estranged masculinity that is alien in the sense of
both foreign and alienated. As described earlier, even though men experienced their foreign status as a sexual draw that brought both erotic
pleasure and social status, in each performance of the role of the ‘foreign
man’, there was the reaffirmation of their own outsider status in China.
For western men who used these intercultural relationships as a way of
social integrating or establishing their cultural status as insiders in China,
their sexual capital worked for and against them. Compulsive and
routinized sexuality became a barrier to other social activities, including
friendships with Chinese men. The sexual capital that the western man
enjoyed in China, like economic capital for the capitalist, was something
that belonged to him but also stood apart from him, becoming increasingly alien with the expansion of the activities involved. The ‘whiteness’
these men embody was also constructed within a racialized sexual field.
White male bodies in China were not ‘invisible’ as they might be Europe,
but rather were ‘wild’ (ye) and ‘foreign’ (wai). In sum, western men in
China experienced their foreign masculinity as both empowering and
marginalizing, a kind of ‘alien sexual capital’ that was simultaneously
exploitable but estranged.
The historical trajectory of this alien sexual capital can be interpreted
through the changing political economy of the sexual field in which it is
formed. At the beginning of the opening and reform era, the local field
of legitimate sexual relations in China was still highly circumscribed, very
closely allied with marriage, and virtually closed to foreigners. Many
visiting western men did not see any opportunities with Chinese women
and directed their libidinal interests elsewhere. At the same time, however,
new leisure spaces frequented by westerners became a site for the advent
of a new field of casual interracial sexual relationships, within which
western men were endowed with great sexual capital. By the 1990s the
larger nightlife scene had expanded into full-fledged night-life zones in all
Chinese cities, simultaneously widening the sexual field but also diminishing the relative value of alien sexual capital. Seen in this context, the
frenetic sexual activity of some western sojourners in China was partly
motivated by a lack of social and cultural capital to integrate into Chinese
society in other ways, and partly by a sense of the declining returns on
foreign sexual capital.
An important implication of the theory of sexual fields is that desires
and desirability are structured by the field itself, providing a sociological
and contextual explanation of ethnosexual relationship patterns. For
example, there is little evidence in my ethnography of a timeless sexual
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Farrer A Foreign Adventurer’s Paradise?
preoccupation with Chinese femininity. Nor was there an unchanging
sense of the meanings of western masculinity and sexuality. Western men’s
sexual interests in local women, and women’s interest in western men,
grew with the expansion of a sexual field. Western men’s renewed fascination with Chinese women was fed by a narcissistic fascination with their
own sexual charisma and their personal role in China’s ‘sexual opening’.
In turn, Shanghai women invested in forms of interracial sexual capital
that included attitudes, erotic techniques, social acumen and specialized
knowledge of foreign sexual culture. These investments produced a sense
of increased control over their sexuality, but also alienation from a larger
Chinese society.
This study shows that sexual capital is convertible though not reducible
to other forms of capital. In one clear pattern, many western men used
their relationships to girlfriends and wives, not friendships with male
Chinese, as their principal ties to Chinese society, representing the
convertibility of sexual to social capital. In another clear pattern, Chinese
women used their youthful attractiveness to marry older foreign men with
more economic resources. On the surface this represents a straightforward
exchange of women’s sexual capital for men’s economic capital, but as
Martin and George (2006) point out, there remains a meaningful distinction between the ‘sexual attractions of wealth and power’ (e.g. the ‘Bill
Clinton effect’) and the exchange of sex for wealth and status. In my
observations, western men involved with younger and sexier Chinese
women relied on this ambiguity in constructing their sexual attractiveness
as men, in a sense converting economic capital to sexual capital. As
Chinese women became more economically equal to their foreign lovers,
they still used their relationships with foreign men to develop sexual, social
and cultural capital, all of which were useful in the larger context of the
global city.
Finally, this study has implications for the study of other transnational
sexual fields. Staying in Shanghai, overseas Chinese and Japanese were
transplanting their own forms of leisure and transnational sexual subcultures, including institutions such as karaoke hostessing and second wives
(ernai) (Lang and Smart, 2002; Shen, 2005). These constituted rather
different fields of possible sexual relationships. Gay and lesbian intercultural sexuality and the relationships of Chinese men and foreign women
in Shanghai also deserve special treatment. As this study shows, the
organization of sexual fields is transnational (or ‘translocal’) and dynamic,
requiring an attention to the political economy of sexual fields. Men and
women shifting to new or emerging sexual fields may find the worth of
their sexual capital rising and falling, and individuals can be seen making
decisions to maximize the utility of their sexual capital, but not without
mixed consequences for their own psychological and social well-being.
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Sexualities 13(1)
Notes
1. This article builds on a larger study of foreign residents in Shanghai and their
interactions with local society. These data collected from 2002 to 2008
consist of interviews with 250 foreigners living in Shanghai, and 50 of their
Chinese romantic partners or coworkers. Foreign informants included 40
Japanese, with most others from Europe and North America. Most
interviews with Chinese were conducted in Chinese. All names are
pseudonyms.
2. It is important to note that the field of sexual relationships is itself stratified
by types of relationships people enter into. Long-term and short-term
relationships are often considered by very different standards. The dynamics
of long-term interracial courtships and marriages is an important topic that I
treat elsewhere (Farrer, 2008).
3. Many western women I interviewed also expressed a reluctance to consider
Chinese male partners, and some spoke of leaving China to find husbands.
This topic is too important, however, for a short treatment here, and will be
written about in a separate paper.
4. Zhang said that he was not upset by the issues of interracial dating and
sexuality. His goal was to expose the racist attitudes of Chinabounder, and
indirectly to criticize Chinese who were unable to see that foreigners held
these negative opinions and stereotypes about Chinese men in particular. He
considers his project to be one of pursuing equality between China and the
West (personal communication March 2008).
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Biographical Note
James Farrer is Associate Professor of Sociology in the Graduate School of
Global Studies and Director of the Institute of Comparative Culture at Sophia
University in Tokyo. He has conducted several years of ethnographic fieldwork
in Shanghai, and also conducted interview and ethnographic projects in Tokyo,
where he has lived for over a decade. His current work focuses on expatriates in
Shanghai, and a comparative study on youth sexualities in Japan and China. He
is author of Opening Up: Youth Sex Culture and Market Reform in Shanghai
(University of Chicago, 2002). Address: Sophia University, 7–1 Kioicho,
Chiyoda-ku, Tokyo 102–8554. [email: j-farrer@sophia.ac.jp]
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