Mitch Moxley worked in a unique industry in China: being a white man. Apparently, it's beneficial in the eyes of some Chinese businessmen to have white men standing around looking important. So that's what Moxley and others have been paid to do:
Link via Fausta's Blog | Image: University of Texas
Previously: Meet a Black Person
“I call these things ‘White Guy in a Tie’ events,” a Canadian friend of a friend named Jake told me during the recruitment pitch he gave me in Beijing, where I live. “Basically, you put on a suit, shake some hands, and make some money. We’ll be in ‘quality control,’ but nobody’s gonna be doing any quality control. You in?”
I was.
And so I became a fake businessman in China, an often lucrative gig for underworked expatriates here. One friend, an American who works in film, was paid to represent a Canadian company and give a speech espousing a low-carbon future. Another was flown to Shanghai to act as a seasonal-gifts buyer. Recruiting fake businessmen is one way to create the image—particularly, the image of connection—that Chinese companies crave. My Chinese-language tutor, at first aghast about how much we were getting paid, put it this way: “Having foreigners in nice suits gives the company face.”
Link via Fausta's Blog | Image: University of Texas
Previously: Meet a Black Person
Comments (18)
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thelaowai@yahoo.com
June 30th, 2009 at 5:39 pm
The scuba diver one was best. I dont like how that site hijacked my history. That doesnt make me want to visit there again - dumbasses."
Uh, there's nothing on the site that hijacks your history. Put the bong down and install some antivirus software.
PS: The scuba diving one is CGI, it was part of a commercial. It's not real.
I haven't been smoking anything, JamesM, but thanks for the insult. What happened when I visited that site? Sometimes you visit a place and it changes the history so you have to physically choose the link you want to get back to from the list. In other words, it places itself in your last couple of links in order to prevent you from easily using the back button to leave the site. That's inconvenient and shows little regard for the visitor. This site actually changed the entire history in the list to itself, meaning that I had to resort to other means to get back to Neatorama. In my own words, it hijacked my history. It was a javascript function, and it's the first time I've seen a site pull that particularly rude stunt.
So the scuba diver is CGI. It's still the best of the bunch of those pictures, in my opinion.