Insights into China, Part 5: An invitation to a party
Chinese baijiu or “white spirits” brands, with the most famous, Maotaijiu, front and centerA BIT OF BACKGROUND
It’s sometimes claimed that there are no real cultural differences between the East and the West. For one thing, we live in a global village in which societies the world over are in constant flux, cultural differences are merging, and where they are held to exist at all are too hybridized to meaningfully describe. For another, to speak of the “East” and the “West” is to create a false dichotomy. It’s to exaggerate differences where they don’t necessarily exist, to separate “us” from “them” and thus obscure our common humanity. I largely agree with this. My own decades-long project of writing about China is precisely to deconstruct these dichotomizing and essentializing habits. Too often, assumed differences between the East and the West or between China and the West are revealed to be nothing more than hackneyed stereotypes. (For the purposes of this essay, I’ll be using the terms “Eastern,” “Asian,” and “East Asian” to refer collectively to China, Japan, and South Korea.)
Yet in certain domains differences are very real and still apply. The example we shall discuss here is the social activity known as the party. At the risk of seeming to dichotomize with a vengeance, let me start off with a bold claim: when it comes to partying, nothing is more terrifying to an East Asian than attending a Western party, and nothing is more miserable to a Westerner than attending an Asian party. This will take a bit of explaining before we get to the specifics of Chinese parties. My purpose in the following rundown on Western party culture is not to edify you on something you are all too familiar with, but to point up key differences from Eastern party culture.
We need first of all to distinguish between two basic types of Western party, the closed party and the open party, the former more prevalent among grownups, and the latter, young people. Closed parties are by invitation only or among known associates: the dinner party with friends or neighbors, the Friday evening cocktail party at the office. For dinner parties, it’s the norm to arrive up to half an hour after the stated starting time, and to bring a bottle of wine. With larger dinner parties known as potlucks, guests each bring a dish they’ve cooked. You can expect the party to last no more than three hours (unless it’s a swingers party!), and you’ll make a good impression by not being the first to leave.
Open parties are much bigger affairs, successful ones anyway, in which just about anyone can attend, not just friends of friends or by word of mouth, but even anyone off the street. Back in my university days, in my off-campus neighborhood on Friday and Saturday nights, knots of young men would sniff out parties, easy enough to spot from the noise and activity in apartment windows, and simply buzz themselves in, despite having no personal connection to anyone at the party. (This can lead to trouble if they’re thieves scoping out your place for a planned break-in, though most college students don’t own much that’s worth stealing.) Open parties get started around 8 or 9 PM; again, you don’t want to embarrass the host and yourself by arriving on time. It’s more fashionable to arrive after 10 PM, and to magically show up by discreetly slipping in through the kitchen back door. If you must make a splash upon entry, do it with aplomb. You can leave anytime you want—at dawn, or five minutes after you arrive (when the guys outnumber the gals five to one). No need to apologize if you beat a hasty retreat. If more than a few people are present, no one will notice your absence, unless you’re the sole female guest.
The only thing you have to do at a Western party, and are expected to do, is make small talk. The shy tend to stick with those they already know, but it’s more productive to talk people up, gain new friends, and meet potential bedmates. It’s easy to engage strangers if there’s dancing. The more crowded and noisier a party is, the better for interacting. A few alcoholic drinks can help. A “keg party” means big barrels of chilled beer and a good marketing move by the host to attract people. There is no such thing as a party of teetotalers.
We get acculturated to Western-style partying from an early age. I hosted my first party at fifteen, in my basement bedroom. Word got out fast among my junior high classmates and over thirty people showed up, spilling into the adjoining laundry room. I had prepared a case of cola and orange pop. I needn’t have worried about being too young to buy booze; it came with the guests. My parents were upstairs. At one point my father came down to see how things were going and didn’t make it all the way down: several kids were passed out at the foot of the stairs in their vomit. During senior high, some house parties (arranged when parents were away) were so crowded it took twenty minutes to work your way from one side of the room to the other. This is another difference: people tend to stand and walk around in Western parties; they sit and stay put in Eastern parties. The biggest parties were outdoors. There was a park by the river where hundreds from our high school congregated every weekend until we got raided by the police.
Western parties are really quite simple. Thrown together with a mix of familiar and new people, you try to meet as many as possible or get more intimate those you’re already acquainted with. Straightforward and logical to us, the Western party is, however, very trying and intimidating for East Asians. You have to imagine yourself in their shoes. Having little experience in the social art of spontaneously approaching strangers, they don’t know what to do with themselves. They feel like they’ve been thrust into a speed-dating event for which they are totally unprepared. For Asian females, it’s both easier and harder: easier because if they’re passably attractive they’ll be approached by interested men; harder because gender-based sexism is more entrenched in East Asian culture, discouraging women from taking the initiative. Asian males have it the worst; unless they’re savvy enough to know what to do, they’re rendered perfectly invisible.
East Asians are kept in childhood longer than their Western counterparts. Through high school they are strongly discouraged from dating and sex. Though some defy this, it’s particularly hard in China, where many high schools are boarding schools run like reform schools; they’re kept in classrooms every night studying before being sent to their dorms at bedtime. If they are day schools, parents likewise lock them up in their bedrooms to study away the rest of the day. It’s as if the entire educational system is geared solely to prevent sexual activity; even university students used to be expelled for sex. Most factories in China are run the same way. It’s a challenge for young assembly-line workers to find the time off even to have a date, let alone any privacy with the opposite sex; older male workers find streetwalkers.
The virginity cult is even more institutionalized in paternalistic China than in Korea and Japan. This exerts great psychological pressure over young people, who by default become deeply invested in the ideology that “traditional” (chuantong) is good and “openminded” (kaifang) is bad. The term “openminded” strictly connotes not capaciousness of thought but sexual deviance; for girls, it’s equivalent to being labelled a slut. If young Koreans and Japanese appear less brainwashed than the Chinese in this regard, they are not wholly immune. They too miss out on the brutal sex-selection process that American high schoolers collectively undergo and are thus more innocent. American teenagers’ training in dating starts early, and makeup regimens even earlier, even as their schizophrenic society threatens them with statutory rape for engaging in underage sex (we don’t mean pedophiles but a seventeen-year-old sleeping with an eighteen-year-old).
By the time the Chinese begin to explore sex, they’re already legally adults and out of their parents’ purview in their university dorms. Those studying abroad have been fed all sorts of rumors about casual sex and drug use at Western parties, which frightens them away just as effectively as fear of engaging with locals face-to-face. Most don’t know the English words “weed,” “marijuana” or “cannabis” (dama in Chinese); those who do envision a scene out of a crack house. This is why comparatively few Chinese show up at Western parties in North America or Europe: they’re scared shitless to attend. There is also little concept of the American frat party. To attend a party they’ve been invited to in an off-campus location rather than on campus, even if it’s just a few minutes’ walk down the street, is too big of a deal. Not to mention that fear of crime in many U.S. neighborhoods is not unfounded.
Add to this the language problem. Nonnative English speakers from Europe and other parts of the world where English is actively used as a lingua franca are generally able to navigate English-language contexts with ease. While there are exceptions of course—English-language majors, the linguistically driven—the Chinese, Koreans, and the Japanese are notoriously challenged by English. English instruction in East Asian schools is almost exclusively passive—reading, listening, and grammar. It’s very hard to insert yourself into a cluster of strangers chattering away in fluent English when you’ve had hardly any real-world oral English practice. How can you meaningfully contribute to a conversation when you have absolutely no idea what they’re talking about?
The language problem is at bottom a cultural problem. Europeans are good at English since they’ve grown up with Anglo-American culture (U.S. mass-media hegemony if you will), submerged in it since childhood, and their own culture isn’t all that different to begin with. Asians, by contrast, are familiar enough with Hollywood and other Americana, but it’s a superficial familiarity seen from afar and often poorly understood. This cultural gulf is considerably more extreme in China than in Japan and Korea. Many Chinese have heard of the Beatles and may even recognize one or two of their tunes, but they can’t discern anything about the music that distinguishes it from the blandest pop music. The massive symbolism of the Beatles’ psychedelics-fueled aesthetic revolution that engendered Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band and the wider countercultural significance of that historic moment is completely lost on the Chinese. It draws a blank and we struggle to explain it, just they struggle to explain to us why Taiwanese pop star Jay Chou reigns king of the musical world. Music appreciation is an acculturation process we take for granted yet begins from a young age.
Vast numbers of Asians desire to study, work, and live abroad if they can (here I mean Asians more generally, including South and Southeast Asia); simply consult the numbers enrolled in U.S. universities for instance. As can be said of Westerners trying to become “native” in non-Western cultures, those who learn to swim comfortably in Anglo-American culture are a special case. They tend to be highly ambitious and linguistically talented. They seek out romantic/sexual partnering with English speakers to help this along. They’re rebels of a sort, consciously hostile toward the perceived backward aspects of their native culture. And because their sexist upbringing gives them something to rebel against, Asian females seem to be better at mastering unfamiliar cultural territory than their male compatriots. You’ll see them at parties. But let’s get back to the Asian context.
INTERLUDE: JAPANESE PARTY CULTURE
Before I lived in China I lived in Japan, where I was introduced to the Asian party. I start with Japanese party culture because it has much in common with the Chinese. This will enable us to see sort out the unique aspects of Chinese parties later. What can be stated at the outset is that unless the host is a Westerner, the “open” party favored in the West, in which guests not personally known to the host are welcome, and the more the better, is not the custom in Japan, China or elsewhere in East Asia.
Japanese parties, known as enkai, follow the same script, though larger parties tend to be more formal and smaller affairs more relaxed. They are regularly held in restaurants and rarely in people’s homes. Enkai are normally workplace events, but even informal get-togethers among friends are usually held in restaurants. This has a practical purpose. Most Japanese don’t live in big American-style houses with spacious living rooms but in small apartments which are not set up to entertain more than a handful of people. Visitors are confined to relatives or close friends. Japanese in the countryside who have larger homes could stage parties if they wanted to but don’t out of habit: there’s no tradition for doing this. Moreover, many unmarried Japanese live with parents who may not want their privacy invaded. Those who have moved out and work in the city while still single make do with apartments not much bigger than dorm rooms. There’s just not much space anywhere save restaurants, which have dedicated rooms for party purposes.
Medium-to-large restaurants are outfitted with private rooms of varying sizes, from intimate three tatami-mat rooms for a handful of guests sharing shabu shabu (Japanese hotpot) to big rooms with long tables for accommodating groups of ten, twenty or more; banquet halls can accommodate all of a firm’s employees. The largest parties take place at the annual Bonenkai event in December, attended by whole companies. Workplaces regularly organize parties to maintain employee morale, and the high school I was teaching at was no exception. I attended many a Japanese workplace party during my employment there.
The routine is always the same. Everything is choreographed and nothing left to chance. Guests arrive punctually at the starting time. As per custom in homes and restaurants everywhere in Japan, shoes are removed and you sit cross-legged at a low table (tables may have a recessed space for extending the legs). There is assigned seating, with your name on a card at your place. This relieves guests of the burden of having to decide where to sit. Men are typically arranged toward one end of the table, women at the other. This is not always the case but the reason for this common practice will soon become clear.
Everyone is served the same set menu. Depending on your workplace’s budget, the food may be quite elaborate, with multiple courses served by kimono-clad waitresses. Small glasses are filled close to the brim with Kirin beer (the favored brew when I was there), with just enough space at the top to accommodate the head—an important detail I’ll return to below when discussing Chinese parties. The toasting rounds begin after a speech or two by the bosses. Later, as people loosen up, some will get up to go around the table for one-on-one toasting. In the year-end Bonenkai, male tipsiness is not only encouraged but expected, even demanded; it provides the opportunity to make up with any colleagues holding grudges in emotional tete-a-tetes, where apologies gush out and everything is supposedly forgiven.
Drunkenness is de rigueur not just at the Bonenkai but at lesser events throughout the year. Once the dishes have been cleared, it’s karaoke time. The microphone is passed around and everyone given a chance to make a fool of themself. I’m not a karaoke fan but was not allowed to opt out. They’d happily thrust the song catalogue at me when it was my turn, which always contained a few English hits, such as Frank Sinatra’s “My Way” or the Beatles’ “Let It Be” (the latter a surprisingly difficult song to sing). That was decades ago; the selection is probably more sophisticated today. Everyone’s performance, no matter how bad, is greeted by a roar of approval. As with the pressure on male guests to drink until they puke, it serves as a social leveler, disabusing the stuck-up of their snobbery and pride.
The females in attendance are not pressured to drink, though they may imbibe a little. As the men become more raucous and the karaoke fizzles out, the fairer sex find the right moment to get up on cue and excuse themselves en masse. Any who remain are acknowledging a fondness for male company—and dirty jokes. By this point, some of the men are so drunk they’re incoherent or unconscious. The rest may either agree to call it a night or carry on in ever more vulgar vein. Physically pawing any remaining women is taboo, above all when everyone is from the same office. If it occasionally happens, and I’m sure it does, I never witnessed it. I’m not the type to get piss drunk. As a foreigner I was usually excused when the women were.
CHINESE PARTY CULTURE
In many Chinese parties, especially those to which foreigners are invited, the drinking that characterizes Japanese parties is replaced by games. Let’s revisit a staff party I attended at my first university teaching job at Capital Normal University in Beijing in 1994. The school had just built a spiffy entertainment center for such purposes. In attendance besides us ten “Foreign Experts” are an equal number of Chinese teachers, the President and Vice President of the Foreign Language College, a few well-behaved student representatives, and staff from the school’s Foreign Affairs Office, which organized the party. We are arranged around round banquet tables replete with snacks. The foreign teachers have their own table; sitting with us is our supervisor, Professor Ding. Though beer is on offer, drunkenness is not encouraged and most sip Coke or Sprite. The teaching profession must set a good moral example.
As at Japanese parties, everything is worked out in advance, to prevent you at all costs from not knowing what to do with yourself. Before we can even break the ice with small talk, Mrs. Zhang of the Foreign Affairs Office is already announcing the first activity: a song contest. The foreign teachers are each to sing a song in English from memory. When I protest that I really can’t sing, she suggests reciting some lines from Shakespeare. I’m completely unprepared for this. I toy with pulling a Karen Finley, the infamous American performance artist whose recommended antidote to stifling social gatherings was to get up and walk out, but not before turning around and announcing loudly to everyone present, “I’m going to get the hell out of here!”
Professor Ding is as reluctant to sing as myself. He comes to the rescue by jotting down in pinyin (alphabetized Chinese) the lyrics to an old Cultural Revolution ditty that we’re permitted to sing together: “The East is red, the sun is rising / China welcomes Mao Zedong / To the people he brings happiness / To the people he is the Great Leader.” We huddle to rehearse the song once and go up to the mike. As he sings I mumble along in turn, to everyone’s amusement. We don’t win but it gets us off the hook. The next activity is a race. I’m paired with an American teacher. Each pair has their inner legs tied together and we’re to run the length of the room and back on three legs. A little foresight—coordinating our first steps—helps us cross the finish line first, while the others get tangled up in the silliness of it all. In comradely spirit, everyone receives the same prize. Next is involuntary disco dancing to the music of Bananarama, and finally a lesson in traditional Chinese dancing. Our hosts beam with satisfaction at bringing the whole thing off without a hitch and we’re delivered at long last to our bus waiting outside.
The rush of activities steamrollers over all attempts at private conversation. Not a detail is left to chance nor anyone to their own devices. Our spontaneous interaction is to be prevented at all costs, as it might be interpreted as a sign of fidgeting or worse, muted hostility at their organizational failure. I’d suggest that the totalitarian control exerted over us is an unconscious holdover from the self-criticism sessions workplaces had to undergo from the outset of the People’s Republic to the end of the Cultural Revolution. Workers spent the evening hours every day after work in Alcoholics Anonymous-style confessional meetings but without the cordiality. The purpose was more than just the cultivating of a revolutionary mindset. It was above all to get people used to not having any time to themselves and thereby prevent such bourgeois habits as private thoughts and fantasies from taking root.
Had I been invited instead to a workplace party in a non-educational profession, the partaking of alcohol would have been guilt-free. In China it is just as copiously employed to grind down egos and enforce camaraderie as in Japan and Korea. Soon after arriving in Beijing, I visited a noodle shop close to campus for lunch one day. Loud groups of beet-red drunk working-class men sat outside on plastic stools with empty bottles of Yanjing beer and 100ml flasks of 56% ABV Erguotou sorghum spirits balanced on rickety tables. That’s why many offices in Chinese workplaces have cots for napping after lunch, so that colleagues can be rested up for more drinking at dinner. Women are excused from this, as they are from the chain-smoking ritual accompanying the drinking that requires handing out cigarettes to everyone in turn. If women are taxed with housework on top of their day job, at least they have a longer life expectancy. It does help, however, that drinks are never served on an empty stomach but only after the food arrives.
I’ve attended many a Chinese dinner party but fewer and fewer over the years, as I simply refuse to go anymore. In the type of anthropological research known as ethnography, the study of another culture by living among locals to observe their practices firsthand, you’re supposed to adopt an “emic” (insider) as opposed to an “etic” (objective) perspective—academic jargon for putting yourself in their shoes as much as possible. But everyone has limits, or institutional barriers, as to how far they will immerse themselves in an alien domain. A female researcher studying sex-work practices in East or Southeast Asia is not about to engage in sex work herself, though this is really the only way to deeply understand the profession. Similarly, I’m willing to bond with Chinese males only so far, without alcohol that is, guaranteeing that I will never belong. It’s a compromise that I’m fine with. I think I can understand things well enough from plenty of drink-free interactions and experiences.
You can observe work-unit parties at neighboring tables, when a restaurant’s private rooms are all taken up. They typically occur among people of a similar age, with one or two older guests. There is an elaborate toasting etiquette, and seating arrangement as well, depending on the rank of the boss or bosses present. It starts with beer, served in small glasses as in Japan. Chinese beer has a lower alcohol content of three to four percent, with a weak head whose foam dissipates quickly, particularly when served at room temperature as it customarily is. This makes it easy to fill your neighbor’s glass precisely up to the brim, preventing cheating with excess foam and ensuring everyone quaffs the same amount when toasting. And you may only drink during toasts. Weak beer also leaves room in the liver for the ubiquitous baijiu (grain-alcohol) spirits available in every restaurant in multiple grades of quality. You display your generosity by treating the table to the most expensive baijiu on offer, such as the Maotai or Wuliangye brands. Again, any females present may opt out with Coke or Sprite, also served room temperature, as it’s believed chilled beverages are bad for the digestion.
The presence of a foreigner alters the dynamics. They may try to drink you under the table but won’t be quite so insistent if you refuse—unless the stakes are high, such as an important business deal, when drunkenness can forge a brotherly bond of trustworthiness. Otherwise, feign incomprehension (harder to do if their English is acceptable) or claim a medical condition. What you can always expect is repeated declarations of mutual “friendship,” on top of much boasting on the part of the hosts. This is not to puff up their egos so much as to hint at their powers of guanxi, that is, the future exchanging of favors, should you become a heartfelt part of their circle. Unless it’s your own work unit, all the bragging is only for show and you’ll likely never hear from them again. But you might get the occasional odd request for help to start the ball rolling. One Chinese acquaintance, personally acquainted with my wife so it was hard refuse, enlisted me in awkward scheme to work out a special visa deal with the U.S. Embassy in Beijing. He assumed that as a citizen I must have had clout there and could pull strings (not even close). In another case, an attractive Chinese female wined and dined me before getting me to impersonate a Frenchman to represent her jewelry business’s new branch opening in the city of Tangshan, where I had to give a public speech outside the shop before an audience of municipal authorities and the local media—details that were sprung on me at the last moment.
As in Japan, Chinese parties are routinely held in restaurants and rarely in people’s homes. Even something as simple as one couple inviting another over for dinner is an anomaly. The Chinese regard their home as an intensely private, inviolable space, inherently incompatible with company. For some, it could be they live in a pigsty and can’t be bothered to make it presentable for just a few hours. But those who keep their homes obsessively neat and tidy don’t invite people over either. Why have people over when it’s easier and more logical to meet in a restaurant? Outside the sharply delineated space of the restaurant and the bar, public space is hostile, while private space is out of bounds. What’s lacking in Chinese culture is the concept of the home as a social sanctuary, and a pleasant one at that, not just for family but for friends and even strangers.
As a foreigner you are a novelty. You actually stand a greater chance of being invited to a family’s home than locals do. My old supervisor Professor Ding, with whom I’m still in touch, is a pretty well-connected guy, having long served as senior faculty and occasional head of his university’s Foreign Language College. He has attended more than enough restaurant parties over his career, as it’s how wheels are greased in China, even in the educational field. After four decades of living in Beijing, however, he can count the number of times he’s been invited to a family’s home for dinner on one, maybe two hands. To his credit, he has had me over for dinner.
THE SUBCULTURE
Now, foreigners who have lived in China may take issue with my thesis by claiming they have attended Western-style parties at people’s homes. Many of these house parties, however, were probably hosted by foreigners, blissfully unaware that it’s not the tradition. Chinese guests are nonetheless drawn to these parties by the enticing whiff of danger, which grows in proportion to the number guests. Where the Chinese themselves host house parties, they are either involved or living with a foreigner, or they have lived abroad and experienced the exotic Western phenomenon firsthand. In the 90s, few Mainlanders had the opportunity to live abroad, apart from illegal immigrants and a growing handful of graduate students. Both groups rarely mixed with locals and thus had scant experience of the Western party. Those who were invited and dared to attend found to their surprise that they enjoyed the experience. The number of Chinese studying abroad has skyrocketed in the decades since. Obviously, many upon returning to China try to recreate the memorable experiences they had and further influence those around them. However, China remains hostile to the Western party even today. Let’s look at this more closely.
The first house party proper I attended in China was a Christmas party in December of 1995 hosted by a very interesting woman. Shasha was the daughter of a couple who had been thrown in prison during Mao’s Anti-Rightest Campaign (1957-59) for the crime of being university professors. Upon their release two decades later, they opened up the celebrated Sanwei Shuwu bookstore-cum-teahouse. It was on my first visit to the teahouse that I met Shasha’s mother. My Chinese was very sketchy at the time, but she managed to get across that she had a daughter who was seeking a foreigner to practice her English with. She was flabbergasted to learn that Shasha was living in the apartment directly above mine at the Beijing Friendship Hotel. She arranged for us to get together immediately and the next day a brash, confident woman in her thirties invited herself into my apartment. I didn’t have a sofa but only armchairs, and Shasha plopped herself down at my feet. She was braless in a loose top, and as she explained how she wound up at the Friendship Hotel, it dipped open salaciously while we grappled with our broken English and Chinese. I learned that her current research interests were Tibetan burial practices, where corpses are consumed by vultures, and the Chinese trans community, including those undergoing sex-change operations, such as the famous dancer Jin Xing, among the first to receive one in China.
In the 1980s, Shasha had mixed with pro-democracy intellectuals and opened her own bookstore, carrying the most provocative books available, at a time of relative political openness (today there are no provocative books of any nature). During the Tiananmen Square crackdown in 1989, she was arrested and spent several months in prison, where she became friendly with lesbians and dissidents. After her release, she no longer sold books but continued networking, picking up friends in the media—and an American boyfriend who worked at the Foreign Languages Press as an editor. It was he who lived in the apartment above mine, and about a year before I arrived, in 1993, she moved in with him. She was soon arrested for illegally cohabitating with a foreigner. However, since the police were already well acquainted with Shasha from her Tiananmen Square days, they were lenient and, breaking precedent, ordered the Friendship Hotel to allow her back. Apparently after that incident, the hotel looked the other way whenever Chinese females entered foreign males’ apartments, explaining why I was able to have my own share of female company over for the night.
I wondered why she needed to practice English with me when she was living with an American guy. His Chinese was pretty good, she explained, and in the interest of becoming fluent refused to speak English with her. Not long after we met, they left the Friendship Hotel and moved into a smartly refurbished old flat in a hutong lane. Shasha invited me to her housewarming party on Christmas Day. The boyfriend was out of town and not present, but there was no shortage of guests. She seemed to be acquainted with just about every beautiful female journalist and reporter in the city and made sure to invite enough males to pair up with them: it was more of a tribal mating ritual than a Western-style party. Alcohol was free-flowing and dancing marshaled with blues and jazz from their cassette tape collection. Shasha repeated the performance a few weeks later with a smaller affair of five or six couples and a few stray singles, which began with a dinner around their big dining table. She quickly came down with something, however, and had to excuse herself and disappear into her bedroom for the rest of the night. Yet she demanded that everyone carry on without her. I danced with one attractive woman, embracing closely like vines and groping each other until we had to break off at the point of losing control.
This woman, whose husband was stationed in another city for work, invited me to her apartment. I mention this only as it provides another entry point for understanding home visits in China. Most of the time I was invited to a person’s home, it was not for a meal but a tryst with a woman. In the 90s, there was no other option, apart from hidden grottoes in parks in summertime; before 2003, unmarried couples were not allowed in hotels. But even these trysts were relatively rare, as there is so much fear of the nosy neighbor. A woman who worked for a government arts publication once invited me to her tiny studio apartment for a simple meal cooked on an electric burner. Her building was company run and her flat assigned by her work unit. I had to register at the entrance, while the guard reminded her that I was to be out by 10 PM. I was impressed she invited me over at all. It takes a certain independence and nerve to look askance at Big Brother. On another occasion, a former student invited me to her parents’ apartment for the night. They were diplomats stationed abroad at the time, and she had the place to herself. I asked her if she was concerned about prying eyes. “I don’t care,” she said.
That was back in 1996. The relaxing of police and neighborhood-committee surveillance peaked in this century’s first decade but since the teens has been tightening up again. It was in the noughties that I was able to meet a Chinese woman who organized orgies—not in her pad but in service apartments, primarily for the convenience but also to keep nosy neighbors out of the picture. She would invite an equal number of males and females and charge an entrance fee to cover the hotel and liquor expenses. But other people held such parties at home, typically among circles of foreign males and Chinese females. In those wild years there were plenty of domestic orgies as well, enough to draw the government’s attention and culminating in the “Professor Ma” affair in 2012, a Chinese man who was caught arranging sex parties online and made a big example of. There were also hotel scandals around that time involving the naked jumping from room to room in full view of shocked hotel guests who had not been invited. Thereafter any mixed-sex group of three or more people in a state of undress even in the privacy of someone’s home could be charged with “group licentiousness” and sent to jail. And of course, since the mid-teens, the country’s new General Secretary has ramped up the reversal of freedom by encouraging grassroots suspicion of foreigners. Only a year ago, in 2024, I was staying at a Chinese female friend’s apartment in Beijing for a few days. Her neighbor, an unpleasant elderly woman, caught sight of me one day, merely entering the apartment mind you, and called the police (possibly to claim a reward for turning in foreign spies). It wasn’t a huge deal; the cops phoned my friend to say I was allowed to stay overnight as long as I first registered with her address at the local police station.
If the sight of a single foreigner entering a local’s apartment incites a neighbor to call the police, you can imagine what happens when it’s a string of foreigners filing into an apartment, or making more than the usual amount of noise, whoever happens to be living there. It’s not illegal to assemble in someone’s private home, but it’s particularly dangerous these days for foreigners, since the police have an incentive to bust criminal activity. Western parties are like red meat for hounds. It merely takes a urine test or DNA hair sample to ferret out drug users. DNA can test positive for cannabis up to three months after consumption, proof enough according to Chinese law that you are in possession of an illegal substance, resulting in your immediate arrest and deportation. But even without drug use, who wants the humiliation of police barging in and urine-testing everyone? Although on the whole rare, these busts have been known to also occur at bars, brewpubs, and KTV establishments (a favorite venue for ketamine use among locals, which they used to get away with until the past decade). The ultimate consequence is a creeping fear among the public about private gatherings of more than a few people—except, again, in the candid confines of restaurant rooms.
This fear dovetails with another fear: announcing get togethers to multiple contacts on Chinese social media, namely WeChat. People do this, but with caution and under as legitimate circumstances as possible (holiday celebrations, birthday parties, and the like). While it’s generally safe to do this when there’s no hint of red-flag activity, people are conscious of the fact that large groups tend to attract authorities’ interest and nothing is completely private. During the teens I myself held monthly music “soirees” at my Beijing apartment, attended over the years by scores of Chinese and foreign friends and friends of friends, contacted by an email list. I even held an erotic-themed music party (and benign “striptease” contest), at a time when everyone felt no compunction about participating in parties of any type. I’d hesitate to invite any large gatherings now.
But people go crazy unless they can socialize, and social media are designed to bring people together despite dystopian fears of surveillance. A new trend is to advertise parties on social media (such as the Meetup app) to which anyone can attend for a fee. As well as covering any expenses incurred by the host, the fee keeps attendance down to the devoted, and the parties always have a clear purpose, such as blind-dating, book readings, bilingual “salons,” and cooking events (unlike Western potlucks, the cooking is done at the host’s home since Chinese dishes must be served fresh out of the wok). It remains to be seen how far this trend will develop before the government finds excuses to clamp down.
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Other posts in this series:
Insights into China (Part 1): A walk down the street
Insights into China (Part 2): A visit to a restaurant
Insights into China (Part 3): A stay in a hotel
Insights into China (Part 4): A visit to the library
