Well, let's see what this year's crop of teachers/victims has to say when they finish teaching next week.

Until then, some emails from people I know who left China in the past few months, with a more current view on the culture.

Short version: Really bad, getting worse, foreigner persecution well underway. Seizure of bicycles and motorbikes just because they want it. Random deportations to display who is in charge.

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I was getting more and more worried all the time being in China and sentiment
towards foreigners has dropped into the danger zone.

I just left China 2 days ago after being there four years. You don't have to be important in China to get in trouble, all you have to be seen as is an offender and you are hosed. China in
the last 2 years has turned into a very scary place to live.

China has been cracking down hardcore on vpn's. Also every time the stock market takes a huge hit the government blames it on foreigners. Sentiment has gotten really bad and the market just
took another huge hit. Guess who's going go get hit with it. The government in one city
took my tour bike, made up some story about why I wasn't allowed
to ride it. When I showed them I had all the papers and was legal, you know
what they did? Told me if I argued any more they would put me in jail. I never
yelled, raised my voice, used any poor language. They wanted my bike and that
was that. Left me stranded in the middle of a city. Nope, China is bad news
complete "ma fan". no longer worth the effort or trouble.

In the last two years I was there people were vanishing all the time and/or having government show up at their door for typing the wrong word or name on their phone or internet. It was common practice to get "invited to tea" and if you know anything about China, getting "invited to tea" is the very well polite form of the government calling you into private to talk, and tell you at the same time to clean up your ways or your going to vanish also

Every single year in the city where I lived on the day that Tienanmen square occurred a couple things happen. They crack down the internet to near nothing to keep the Chinese in check, meanwhile
to show the westerners who's boss, they pick a foreigner and kick them out the
country. I was literally threatened with prison for merely having a motorcycle
and my moto was legal.

In the four years I was there it went from a place that was pretty nice to live and work to a place where I
couldn't even budge whether useless internet or a great rise in foreigner
animosity. I mean the government told China that the west was the reason for
the stock market problems. People lost fortunes! And guess who was to blame!? Us!!