I just want to note this: most of you are getting these posters all wrong. Its way worse than don't date foreigners. These are not warnings against dating foreigners (that may call to mind xenophobic campaigns of old). These are warnings that the women who date foreigners will be regarded as security risks.
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Thought balloon: "So, she works for the Foreign Publicity Department...? Excellent! At last we shall learn the secret of their effective propaganda activities! Surely our imperialist intelligence-gathering activity can have no higher priority."
ReplyDeleteThis is unfair to the thousands of foreigners who really ARE just after Chinese poon-tang.
ReplyDeleteLoose lips...?
ReplyDeleteThat is obvious. She is the one who is put in handcuffs in the end. But the one who gets her in the handcuffs is her foreign boyfriend. For reference, my first Chinese teacher was married to a Swiss man. The marriage would have happened sometime soon after the Cultural Revolution, as far as I could tell. By 2001, they had been married for a while and had a teenage son (14 or so, so let's say wedding in mid-1980s). She mentioned once to the class that it was not easy for her because she was ostracized after it happened. Those who interact with foreigners on that level are suspects in the same way as diaspora Chinese are only half trustworthy. They are Chinese and yet foreign. Therefore, they are useful but not reliable in the end. Old wine. New bottles.
ReplyDeleteGood point. Note also that things we might regard as trivial can be considered state secrets in China. They are trying to scare a wide section of the public, not just a few bureaucrats in defense ministries.
ReplyDeleteCan you imagine the backlash if posters like this appeared in say, the US, where it's already proven that dozens of Chinese state-invested companies were set up to do nothing other than spy?
No doubt dating a foreigner is also going to be a big deduction on your social credit rating score too.
ReplyDeleteI don't see why people find this ridiculous. Sure, it's gender constructed. Sure, it warns about language learning and academic research. But the girl works in the department of propaganda, if the leak leads to exposing the propaganda and lies of the state, it would have serious consequences; she should have known better.
ReplyDeleteWhat is also interesting is the route they depict the spy as using. If they think it poses high security risk then they might have used the route themselves. Two words: Confucius Institute.
that must be google glasses on his nose.
ReplyDeleteNote that this is aimed at showing that Western academics are spies. Some of them have done a lot of research in China, but we can't trust them because they're spies for their governments.
ReplyDeleteSo, following the above comment's logic, would be that the inverse is true which implies that many of the "academics" visiting or studying in the west are also spies for China?
ReplyDelete