Sunday, May 9, 2010 @ 12:01 PM Author: clarinda

Location: A luxury villa project in a Nanjing suburb. Wanted: Two reception assistants. Race: White.

Job advertisements in China can throw up a few surprises for those used to a non-discriminatory employment environment. Here, companies make no apologies about openly stating the race of the employees they seek.

And like it or not, the desired skin colour is often white.

'We want our customers to feel like English aristocrats,' explains Ms Xu Yueqin, 35, a real estate executive working for the Nanjing villa project.

All that is required of the white employees - they must be female too, surprise, surprise - is that they usher prospective customers to a marketing office, where Chinese employees will present the sales pitch.

Asked if she felt uncomfortable about the race-based hiring requirement, she replies, matter-of-factly: 'Other companies do the same thing. By and large, Chinese still think all things Western are better.'

Despite the official line that China has 'stood up' after suffering more than a century of humiliation by the Western powers, there is a lingering hangover in Chinese views about the white man.

Many ordinary Chinese continue to associate whiteness with quality, even to the point of 'silliness', as one scholar puts it.

The result? White foreigners who live and work in the Middle Kingdom find opportunities galore to make a quick buck. Observers estimate that two in five in the 230,000-strong foreign student community here have taken up such race-based jobs at some point.

Some companies ask for Western-looking men to pretend to be company directors just to lend them credibility at meetings with potential clients or government officials. In other cases, whites are roped in to help promote upmarket products such as wine or jewellery.

And for schools teaching English, being white has almost become the standard prerequisite for prospective teachers. On first sight, this might seem reasonable if the Caucasian in question is indeed a native English speaker.

But when schools have to choose between a teacher with good English and another with the right ethnic appearance, they invariably opt for the latter even if he or she is less qualified, points out Mr Gregory Bryant, 26, an American who has been living in Beijing since 2005.

One school he taught at passed over Asian Americans who spoke English as their first language for an Eastern European who spoke English 'with a heavy accent'.

'It's a ludicrous hiring standard and it's wrong,' he says. 'But unfortunately, that's the reality we're dealing with in China - a culture that is consumed by appearances and stereotypes.'

Just this year, Mr Bryant was asked by a Chinese ad agency to become the face of the Scotch whisky Chivas Regal, at a Beijing promotional event, even though he does not hail from Scotland. He turned it down.

If he had not, he would have been paid 150 yuan (S$30) an hour, or roughly 10 times the market rate for a local.

'We don't have a choice,' claims Mr Henry Zhou, a headhunter for English schools looking for white-only teachers in the north-eastern city of Shenyang. 'This is what parents ask for. So if we want students, we have to satisfy their demands.'

When pressed whether he would give the job to a Chinese Singaporean fluent in English, he retorts: 'No way. The parents will say, 'Don't try to fool us with a local Chinese!' He must be white.'

Some locals who think the trend is harmless say stereotypes exist in nearly all societies - some are just better than others at hiding them.

'The European media persistently presents stereotypes of China because that's what their audience wants to hear,' argues 26-year-old Guo Pengcheng, a Beijing-based computer programmer.

Scholars say the phenomenon could be partly due to the fact that the Chinese are opening up to the world again only recently, after a long period of isolation. As a result, the tendency is to 'colour code'. In this instance, 'whiteness' is associated with modernity and economic advancement.

Referring to the example of the preference for whites who speak English as a second language over non-whites who are native English speakers, Stanford University China expert Thomas S. Mullaney says that while most Americans will feel that the idea of using the non-white Americans makes perfect sense, China lacks the cultural foundation to understand that, because it has seen little immigration in its recent history.

Some, like Professor Liu Hong from the University of Manchester, are convinced the phenomenon will go away 20 to 30 years from now because ordinary Chinese will become more self-assured as their country grows in strength and international stature, and stereotypes will break down as interactions between Chinese and foreigners intensify.

But others say such deep-seated prejudices will take much longer to be overturned.

Beijing-based lawyer Liu Kun remarks: 'Till today, discrimination against Chinese peasants remains rampant among Chinese urban folk.

'So if we haven't even learnt to look at our own people without prejudice, how much longer will it take to change our views about foreigners?'