Illustration: Lu Ting/GT





An expat-made video audaciously titled "Are Chinese girls easy?" was recently unearthed and analyzed by Guancha.cn, reigniting the passe debate about predatory foreigners in China.

In the video, South African-born Winston Sterzel, 35, who claims to be "China's original vlogger," says that many Chinese women see Western males as wealthier than their Chinese counterparts, which makes it easy for foreigners to get these girls into bed.

"Are Chinese girls easy? Yes, they are," the dapper Sterzel authoritatively states right at the start. "But it depends on the kind of foreigner you are. If you're black, Indian, any kind of dark-skinned race, forget about it."

The borderline-racist video's reemergence follows a spate of seemingly anti-foreign-predator sentiment, including a "Dangerous Love" comic warning Chinese women about handsome foreign men being spies.

By comparison, beer-swilling Serpentza's (Sterzel's avatar as a Shenzhen-based expat) rant seems more like a bitter foreigner who just got dumped by his Chinese girlfriend. But the points which he ticks off throughout his 2011-filmed video - that most Chinese girls come from poor villages and that we start talking about marriage within the first month of dating - are severely outdated.

As a single, post-90s generation Chinese female, I laugh at Sterzel's supercilious assumption that we are all just a bunch of peasants who arrive in urban cities like Shanghai en masse to seek out wealthy-husbands. On the contrary, China's leftover women - older, career-minded females who don't mind putting off marriage in order to pursue their profession - have become such a phenomenon that books have been written about it. I guess Sterzel doesn't read much.

Sterzel really flatters himself by believing that we are all so desperate for money or overseas green cards to escape China that we'd hop in bed with the first Caucasian who crosses our paths. In fact, while I was studying for my Master's of English Literature in the UK a couple of years ago, I had no desire to date local men. The fact that I was already studying abroad rendered moot any yearning for a green card.

Even though I was surrounded by obviously well-off Western students, never did I once deign to hook up with one. Our cultural differences were simply too vast for us to have any kind of deep relationship. The fact that I knew I'd be returning to China to pursue my journalism career meant that, even if I did go on dates, I wouldn't have been optimistic about our future. Why, then, would I want to spend my weekends fending off the advances of white guys?

Most of my Chinese classmates in the UK - I'd say 90 percent of them - felt the same as I did. If we were in the mood for male companionship, we went out with a Chinese guy. Conversing in our mother tongue with someone from a similar cultural background made dating so much simpler.

One of my pretty Chinese gal pals in the UK, Crystal, dared to date a British. He relentlessly invited her to take afternoon tea, and they eventually started seeing each other exclusively, but not once in their four-month relationship did she sleep with him. She eventually returned to China with her virtue still intact.

Another of Sterzel's ludicrous points is that Chinese men are incapable of being monogamous, which, he says, drives Chinese women into the arms of Westerners, but which also makes us all "clingy, jealous and mistrusting." On the contrary, I'd say that Chinese girls generally prefer to date men from China because they take marriage more seriously. Comparing the divorce rates of China and the West, the proof is in the statistics that China has less instances of infidelity.

Part of the reason why expats in China such as Sterzel may perceive local girls to be easy is that most of them spend their free time in bars and nightclubs which, by nature, host singles seeking casual encounters. But If foreigners are truly seeking a chaste Chinese girl to date and possibly marry, then maybe they should try getting out and about in real China rather than hanging out in clubs or sitting in front of computers making silly videos.





The opinions expressed in this article are the author's own and do not necessarily reflect the views of the Global Times.



