Tuesday, July 22, 2008

A rather amazing comment to a sort of blase article

From a Danwei article about Chinabounder (you don't need to know), this is the first paragraph of a four-paragraph comment from someone called bianxiangbianqiao:

If "Great" means attracting the best people in the world, China is in a sorry position. It is collecting junk from the world over. The book and "chinabounder" tell you a lot about the kind of foreigners flooding to China. The most disturbing part is that these losers and castaways from their own country are on university campuses. Not one foreign academic with a real grownup's job (on a tenure-track position) in America I know of over the last decade has gone to China on a long-term basis. China is certainly not attracting the brightest minds in the world. Most of those foreigners on Chinese campuses are not even qualified for adjunct staff (a very sorry position) here. Even China's own people, the Qinghua and Beida graduates who are now the top two most likely candidates to earn American Ph. D.s, are staying away from its universities. (Number 3 is UC Berkeley. Its undergraduates are 45% Asian. How many of them are Chinese descendants?) Why are the patriotic Chinese overseas dragging their feet in America? Is their patriotism fake? No. It is because Chinese universities are filled with losers like chinabounder and "professor" Zhang Jiehai. These two are quite a match. How desperate you have to be to want to join these guys?

Read more here, from a post titled "Fertility Display? What Chinabounder Tells Us about the Western Male Reproductive Strategy":

I read somewhere in the anthropological literature (I am no anthropologist, therefore cannot remember the correct citation) that there are three critical scenes essential to the Western male identity. Number one is the fighting scene. Number two is the drunk scene and number three is the callous sex scene. Reminds me of Sanlitun, as described on the internet; I have never set foot on that part of my hometown.

I have my faults, admittedly, but BXBQ's post sort of makes me proud to not be a laowai -- especially the sort who'd write this crap.

POSTSCRIPT: I'm being facetious, of course, as I tend to be on occasion on this site. It is, however, a bit late for anthropological discussions, so I'll add some thoughts if they come to me later.

POSTSCRIPT 2: The fourth-to-last comment on Danwei's 35-comment thread, nestled between an engrossing exchange between "Bill" and "Pffefer":

People, read my book if you got nothing better to do.
Posted by: Chinabounder | July 19, 2008 10:05 AM

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