Results tagged “expats”

Back when we first heard the story of ladies-of-the-night feeding drugged candy to expat men in order to steal their things, we squealed in schadenfreudetastic glee. Little did we know that there was an even more salacious twist yet to come: The ladies were actually men!

If you always wanted to be a homecoming queen, a model, or a contestant on Oriental Angel, you may want to set your sights on the 2010 Miss Laowai China beauty pageant. The competition is sort of like the Miss Universe competition- one competitor per country will be chosen as a representative for the entire country- but only for expats in China. We're still not sure if this is a joke or a hoax, but it's certainly entertaining!

Dear expat men, we get that Shanghai is filled to the brim with sultry sirens batting their eyelids and flashing their wares, and that it's probably too much to ask you guys to not partake in the debauchery all around you. But, beware; beneath each playful mermaid is a sea monster waiting to feast. Case in point: two Indonesian women who were just detained by police on Wednesday. Their catches - an Australian, a Dutchman and a Frenchman - all fell victim to the same ploy. Vulnerable and drunk (or just horny), these expat men accepted candy - drugged candy - from the ladies at bars around town. These unsuspecting men then took the pair home, only to have all their luggage stolen in the middle of the night. The two ladies were nabbed at their Huangpu hotel and are now under police custody, where they can do rich, lascivious expats no more harm... but don't think there aren't others like them out there! Source: Shanghai Daily

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From Jonathan Cruysberghs of the Facebook group "Daft fcked - hidden concert SCAM! info and update in here":

Hi All,

Continue reading "Update: Daft Punk scam"

• China: “Destroy Japanese Anime!” [Sankaku Complex] "A recent comment by Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao decrying the lack of Chinese anime has incited a flurry of online support, with Chinese net users vigorously denouncing Japanese anime."
• Chinese Hunger for Sons Fuels Boys’ Abductions [NYTimes] "These and thousands of other children stolen from the teeming industrial hubs of China’s Pearl River Delta have never been recovered by their parents or by the police. But anecdotal evidence suggests the children do not travel far. Although some are sold to buyers in Singapore, Malaysia and Vietnam, most of the boys are purchased domestically by families desperate for a male heir, parents of abducted children and some law enforcement officials who have investigated the matter say."
• Bill Schiller on one man's quest [TheStar.com] "In China, noted designer and blogger Ai Wei Wei is on something of a lonely quest for justice. The Star's Bill Schiller explains, via Skype, from Beijing."

Do you know of a marriage that failed after the couple became expats? Karen Mazurkewich, who previously worked in Hong Kong for the Wall Street Journal, is seeking interviews over the next few weeks about how the unique aspects of living and working abroad could spell ruin for the wedded.

... so says our favourite visa agency. In November, regulations were loosened to allow for the 3-6 month F visa, but since 6 December, the 12 month multiple-entry F visa has been made available again. Does the global economic crisis and dwindling tourist numbers have anything to do with this? Maybe, but who cares, really? Check for VisaInChina's updated services and price list here.

... and before you start scoffing, it's all from a very reliable and authoritative source of course — no, it's not AC Nielsen and neither is it Taylor Nelson Sofres — it's a doctoral student from Shanghai University by the name of Ni Lin. Never heard of her? Well neither have we, but if the Shanghai Daily starts quoting her as proof of its popularity among expats in this town, then she must be something right?

Via Micah Sittig on Twitter we learned of this spreadsheet that compares tuition fees for international high schools in Shanghai. Fourteen schools are included on the list and they range in annual cost from US$11,319 (Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corporation Private School), up 30% from last year, to US$30,689 (British International School), up 7% from last year. The only school whose tuition went down this year was the Shanghai American School, down 7% to US$22,092. Time to stock up on the ol' birth control.

A British couple, Scott and Cecile Spirit, has donated RMB400,000 to the Shanghai Children's Hospital to jumpstart the Foundation for Newborns with Respiratory Diseases in the memory of one of their twin sons who died four weeks after they were born prematurely. The Shanghai Children's Health Foundation will donate a further RMB100,000 to the fund which aims to help poor parents seeking treatment for their babies born with respiratory diseases — the cause of 15 percent of neonatal mortality in China. Scott Spirit moved to Shanghai late 2006 and is the China Strategy Director for the advertising group WPP. [Source]

Adam Schokora of Danwei points us to this audio recording of a "disgruntled customer lecturing a telephone operator at a well-known, city-wide food delivery company based in Shanghai". Do a bit of research and you'll find there's only one food delivery company in town that delivers Blue Frog and it happens to be an advertiser on Shanghaiist. Does the voice of this douchebag sound familiar to any of you readers out there? We say unleash the foreign internet mobsters on this guy!

For those of you still wondering if the pre-Olympic easy visa days are going to return or not, here's your answer. They are a thing of the past, so don't look back because they ain't coming back anytime soon. Three months after the Beijing Olympics, the police are still maintaining their vigilance and conducting spot checks by knocking on residential apartments and offices to see if you are really what your visa application says you are. A Filipino maid has just been ordered to leave China for falsifying her documents. In her application for a residence permit in September, she claimed to be a Shanghai branch representative of an international company but was later found by the police to be working as a maid for an executive of a foreign-invested company. [Source]

A friendly reminder from the Shanghai Daily that you would do well to heed:

THE city's exit-entry administration is reminding local foreigners that most will need to renew their residence registration certificates at police stations this month.

Continue reading "Time to update your temporary residence permit"

If you are twiddling your thumbs this weekend and bored out of your maple tree, head down to Yandang Lu for the Hello Allo Canada street festival and mingle with the three lively mascots: the beaver (ummm, you have got to be kidding!!!), the moose and the goose.

Some of you will remember him for his messy hair, and others will remember him for his tight ass, but Aric Queen is back, this time with a hairband. The former City Weekend nightlife columnist, one time Shanghaiist contributor and serial podcaster found himself wanted by the police for a series of videos that he had been filing for Current TV under the name Shanghai Diaries (not to be confused with Dan Washburn's 2002 blog of the same name). Aric is going to tell the story of his exile from Shanghai in a new series which we presume is starting pretty soon.

Last month, we highlighted to you a post by Adam Minter of Shanghai Scrap in which he laments over the sorry state of expat advertising after spotting a full page print ad taken up by the Dragonfly spa chain in (what seemed like) every English language magazine in Shanghai. The ad featured a Caucasian man waxing himself with a 'clean' strip while his right hand (what looked rather like a chicken claw) sported multi-coloured nails that were supposed to be a "tribute to the Olympic rings". The campaign became the talk of the town, but not in the way Dragonfly had hoped for. As it turned out, the ad had the effect of freaking out just about everyone in town who saw it (and possibly up north in Beijing too).

Kids really do say the darndest things! We almost fell off our chair watching this vlog. Basically this 16 year old gay expat teen in Shanghai has just come out to his parents and he decided to share his story with the world on Youtube. After telling his mother on Tuesday over Skype, Zach was half expecting to get a good lynching, as all gay teens do when they come out. What he got was a surprise of his own — his mom turned around and came out to him! Okay, we won't spoil the rest for you. Watch it for a good laugh!

We're sure this latest visa report from Reuters will be like music to the ears of some of you who have been waiting a few months to hear this:

Visa curbs on foreigners travelling into China via Hong Kong as part of a security clampdown during the Beijing Olympics will be lifted next month, a major travel industry association said yesterday.

Continue reading "Lift on curbs on visas obtained via Hong Kong"

In articles written exclusively for AmCham's China Brief magazine, US presidential candidates John McCain and Barack Obama have outlined their visions for US-China relations if they were to come to power.

Watch out ladies, Chinese men are on the prowl. According to this article in Mop, one Chinese man set out to settle a score against Western men, by staking out Western women visiting Beijing during the Olympics. The man in question is from a small town in the middle of nowhere, the kind of place where "in 20 years only one student made it into Tsinghua or Peking University." He managed to test into a technical college and now works in Beijing. His friend relates the story and the motive [in translation],

The local Xinming Evening News 《新民晚报》points us to this uber-harmonious picture of foreign prisoners housed in the Qingpu District Jail standing by their paper model of the Bird's Nest, made with lots of love over the course of 28 days with 18,000 pieces of paper. Awwwwww....

"Kim Soo-seok, 44, a South Korean, is accused of abducting a young fellow countryman who studied in Shanghai in a bid to extort 300 million won (US$295,000) from the victim's wealthy father. His two alleged Chinese accomplices, Jin Mingyu and Chi Minhao, both ethnic Koreans, face charges of illegal detention before the Shanghai No. 1 Intermediate People's Court. The two alleged accomplices pleaded guilty, but Kim said he was entrusted by a friend in South Korea to demand payment of the debt." [Shanghai Daily]

Interesting vid by Chris Pereira of Work in Progress [h/t to Danwei]. Wonder if he wrote the song himself?

"According to the draft, the social-insurance policy expansion will cover expats working for city employers, foreigners who have acquired permanent residency and residents of Hong Kong, Macau and Taiwan. If it is approved, qualified candidates will be allowed to join the city's pension, medical and industrial-injury insurance systems on level terms with their Shanghai-native counterparts. People who have been paying into the city's pension fund for an accumulative period of 15 years before retirement age - 60 for men and 55 for women - can apply for pensions in the city." Anyone looking forward to this? [Source]

and those of us who can never hope to be mistaken for native-born on the metro, though commenters' questions about ethnic minorities within China bring up an interesting consideration. As some of our readers deal with ever-more-complicated visa situations, it’s interesting to wonder when, if ever, foreigners begin to “count.” We’re not sure —thoughts?

We've been writing a lot about the visa situation recently, which has gotten more and more bothersome as the Olympics approach. But this tactic is a new one: Matt of bizCult gives us a play-by-play of his experiences using a student visa... for business purposes. Pros: easier to obtain, multiple entry, much cheaper. Cons: actually having to go to class sometimes, like the Mongolian prostitutes using the same strategy. All in all, Matt gives the method a B++, which is probably better than his GPA, since he skipped his finals.

At this point, this is only an unsubstantiated rumour but a highly plausible one given what we've seen and heard in the last few months. Here is an email sent to us by one teacher at an international school in Shanghai, and we quote verbatim: "I don't know anymore specifics, but I received an Email from my principal warning us about our online behaviour after an international school teacher was deported from China. I don't know the name or the location of the school, teacher or offending website. If more details emerge, I will share them with you." Watch what you put on your website, y'all. Someone's watching.

As China rapidly climbs to world economic power, some enterprising individuals are emigrating here in the hopes of finding a new version of the American Dream. Blogging For China translates an article from the Southern Metropolis Daily on African traders who move to China (notably the city of Guangzhou, which currently holds an estimated 100,000 Africans) with the same burning desire of an earlier generation who emigrated to America: a better life. Many of them face strong prejudice against blacks in China and struggle to integrate themselves into their villages. The reporter follows one Liberian trader as he greets Chinese store-owners in his neighborhood:

He’ll loudly greet them, “Friend, how are you recently?” His “friends” don’t respond. Some pull out a cell phone and intentionally ignore him. Others impatiently wave at him, and say in a combination of Chinese and English: “If you’re not buying anything, then go… quickly GO!”

Continue reading "The Chinese Dream?"

From the highly authoritative People's Daily:

The Beijing Olympics official website recently released "A guide to Chinese law for Foreigners coming to, leaving or staying in China during the Olympics" (hereinafter referred to as "the Guide"). The Guide points out that ticketholders for the Olympic Games from overseas will not automatically be granted a visa. They still need to apply for a visa from China's overseas embassies.