Lessons from the Chinabounder case
September 12, 2006

A month ago, in a post I wrote on my Imagethief blog about the pecking order of foreigners in China, an anonymous commenter asked me what I thought of a blog at chinabounder.blogspot.com (currently closed to the public, so don't rush over). I hadn't heard of it, so I went to have a look. It turned out to be a blog called "Sex and Shanghai" claiming to be the sexual exploits of a randy English teacher in Shanghai. It read like a string of juvenile fantasies and I dismissed it as such, writing the following reply to my anonymous commenter:
[I categorize this guy] along with other people with overactive fantasy lives, such as the guys who wear Star Trek jerseys to the supermarket.
Chinabounder was brought to my attention just a day or so after the long censored Blogspot was unblocked in China, in early August, and it didn't take long before other blogs started to take notice. I ignored it, and I continued to ignore it even when the story took the turn that would ultimately propel it to mainstream attention, when, on August 25th, a Chinese academic named Zhang Jiehai posted a long, angry rant (in Chinese -- ESWN's translation) on his blog essentially calling for Chinabounder's head to be brought to him on a plate for the crime of disrespecting Chinese womanhood.

--more at CNET Asia--

Note: Imagethief is aware he comes to this issue a tad late, but, as regular readers will note, he has been a bit short of writing time recently. This has been sitting in various partially baked forms for a week or so. The post is also published under a slightly more lurid title at CNET, where the readership may be less familiar with the case than I expect Imagethief readers to be. I am not above taking Jeremy's and Roland's page-view generating advice.