Another journalist with a book about their time in China that’s likely to be their only one. Some say there are too many books by white guys detailing their experiences in China in the salad days of the 2000s. I wonder if this crowd will be later remembered like the writers and artists that flocked to Paris in the 1920s. I doubt it. Published in 2013, by Harper Collins no less – and already forgotten – for me, China memoirs like ‘Apologies to my Censor’ are worthwhile reads. I’m still trying to work out what hit me when I moved to the Middle Kingdom in 2001 and these books help me with that.
Mitch Moxley arrived in China for the pre-Olympics boom in Beijing in 2007. A trained journalist with not much going on in Canada, he’d accepted a job at the China Daily, an English-language newspaper that’s a mouthpiece for the Chinese Communist Party.
Moxley is not quite your quintessential loser back home who came to China to teach English and chase girls that wokesters once loved to hate. However, his late Generation X angst about being trapped in boring jobs and wanting to become a freelance writer despite little motivation to get out of bed some days are likely targets for critics. Does everybody have to be Peter Hessler-level committed to the task at hand? I listened to a podcast in which Moxley explains his editor wanted him to change his first draft so it focused more on his own problems rather than the situation of being a ‘white guy for hire’ in general. You can then understand he was annoyed by the criticism levelled at him for being self-centered.
The first part of the book about when he’s at China Daily is the most entertaining. Moxley and other foreigners working at the paper are there as window-dressing and bit-part editors rather than serious writers. Like many ex-pats in Asia memoirs, the profiles of weird and wonderful, flotsam and jetsom foreign colleagues make fun reading.
“When I arrived at China Daily, I was both appalled and thrilled by many of the men I met. Appalled for all the reasons above; thrilled because observing and drinking with them could be so entertaining, and because I figured no matter what I did I could always point to one of them and say at least I’m not like that.”
He makes friends with a local journalist Lois but apart from her, the local staff remain mysterious. Managers, reporters and editors playing a political game, Moxley understandably finds them hard to fathom. However, his observations on how censorship at the paper works are insightful.
“There were no shadowy Party agents leaning over reporters’ shoulders telling them what to write, and as far as I knew, day-to-day stories didn’t go to some high-up government official for approval or rejection. As the Vanity Fair article pointed out, and as I reinforced in my Globe article, there was no “thought police” at China Daily. Instead, reporters and writers simply knew what they could and could not report, and nobody ever challenged those limitations. In this way, change wasn’t coming from the bottom, and it certainly wasn’t coming from the top.”
No dictate then but everybody knows an invisible line exists and that in China it’s not hard to cross. I could be wrong, but in terms of self-censorship, Moxley seems careful to make his stance on China’s ubiquitous prostitution industry one that would please his editors at Harper Collins. Basically, he’s horrified by it. One of Moxley’s freelance stories is about the trafficking of Mongolian women. One woman he interviews for the story surprises him with her pragmatism.
“The boss paid the rent and the girls lived in the back room. When I asked her if she felt trapped, Gerlee, who came to Erlian after a falling-out with her Inner Mongolian boyfriend, said, 'I’m just looking for money. It doesn’t make it good or bad.'”
Moxley quits China Daily after a year. He then survives on voice recording work and the odd loan from his parents. He eventually gets a break by selling an article to the Atlantic called ‘Rent a White Guy’ detailing his short-term gig pretending to be an employee of a company he’s never heard of. The company wanted a few foreigners to pretend to be visiting bosses from the US on a quality control trip. All Moxley had to do for a thousand bucks was sit around the office for a week. The article goes viral and opens up doors for him.
A very solid four stars, maybe four and a half.
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Top reviews from other countries
Reader of Books
A fun ride through an expat's life in China
Reviewed in Canada on August 3, 2013DAVID J KNIGHT
An interesting account of modern life in Beijing
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on November 5, 2013L. Liang
Great insight into a freelance journalist's life in Beijing
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on November 16, 2013
