Both. I have been refused access to a place because the landlord was openly racist and didn't want to rent to me after she found out I was a foreigner. There is pretty much no recourse for foreigners who are victims of racism in China, it's an extremely racist country. When you're a foreigner you just kinda have to accept that there are people who will cross the street or shield their kids when they see you, loudly complain when you sit next to them on the bus, refuse to do business with you, etc etc. Of course in rich areas of tier one cities where the government has an image to uphold, this will happen much less frequently.

That said, definitely in the case of hotels there are loads of hotels it seems there is a legal aspect as well. If you lived in China you might be familiar with the long and boring process of registration with the police every time you move house. Sometimes you even have to register at more than one place because you moved into a different urban area. According to the law, all foreigners must do this everywhere they go in China, including tourists who are on holiday. It wouldn't be very efficient to make tourists spend a couple hours at the police station every time they checked into a hotel, so some hotels have some arrangement with the local police to do this on their guests' behalf behind the scenes. Most tourists nowadays don't even know that they have been registered with the police everywhere they travel. But smaller hotels don't provide that service. I have successfully blagged my way into staying at one smaller hotel by assuring them i would visit the local police myself to register, but a lot of them don't want the hassle or (perhaps) attention from the local authorities, so they just ban foreigners.

When I left China it was during the pandemic, and pretty much no hotels at all would allow foreigners to stay. This was xenophobia, pure and simple. There were a few times I had to first visit the police station and ask the police where I could stay, because hotel after hotel after hotel refused me, despite my green health code, valid visa and so on.

This is weird. Definitely not my experience at all. I visited Shanghai, Beijing, and Chengdu in China in 2012 and I felt extremely welcome wherever I went. I might also add that in Chengdu, a city which sees considerably less foreigners than the other two, I felt like I was being treated like somewhat of a celebrity, with people smiling at me everywhere, and random passer-bys on the street trying to impress me with their renditions of "Good Morning" or "How are you?". Once I had a visibly excited team of students randomly stop me on the street to do an interview with me for their class project, and on another occasion a large group of young people all wanted to take a picture with me one by one.

Needless to say, I loved it.

2012 is a very long time ago by Chinese standards. Xi only became the general secretary in November of that year and the president in 2013. Most of his authoritarian and nationalist policies have only really kicked into a higher gear from 2018. The xenophobia got even worse after the coronavirus hit, and I can't imagine it has improved much since I left in 2020.

Also, I don't know what makes you think that Chengdu is off the beaten path - it's a massive tourist destination, in particular because of its panda reserve, presumed proximity to Tibet and the global renown of Sichuan cuisine (home of mapo tofu, hotpot etc).

Thirdly, this coddling of foreigners is exactly the kind of racist behavior that I find to be degrading. It might feel superficially nice to be treated like you are special or unique, but really it means you are not being treated with respect. They are treating you like a child, or a curiosity. If you visit some of the indigenous communities of China then you will often see the Han majority treat the ethnic minorities in the same way, as if they are just props for photos or some kind of weird creatures to be gawked at. It's gross, imo.

Thank you. I had the same experience as GP in 2010 except I absolutely hated it. Can you imagine if people in the US treated Chinese tourists like that?

I never saw it that way. Your comment definitely opened my eyes.

Some things to keep in mind:

Familiarity breeds contempt.

Western expats in East Asia tend to be quite polarized about their country of residence, and expats in poorer countries even more so. Over time, the tint of novelty wears off and the warts begin to stand out. Poorer countries have more warts.

For folks like myself who are extra sensitive, the negatives get an outsized representation, while the positives and neutrals get filtered out. It took me years of to develop the habits to compensate. I'm far from where I'd like to be, but I'm learning to accept that as well.

This is especially true in places of higher density. If you encounter 1 bad apple in a place of 100 people, vs 10 bad apples of 1000 people, the ratio is the same, but subjectively the latter feels ten times worse. It’s the price you pay for living the city life.

And when you have an under-stimulated career, the idle mind becomes the devil's playground.

We let collective narratives plays a greater role in colouring our opinions (as opposite to direct experience) than we'd like to admit. In this day and age, I don't think it's especially controversial to say that we get more dopamine hits from internet discussions than having a stroll down the street. Ultimately, unless we consciously intervene, the chemicals get to decide what we let ruminate in the back of our minds.

The idiosyncrasies you used to brush off or find amusing are now small but cumulative signs of impending doom. What we get right in direction we get wrong in magnitude. The sprinkles of verifiable truth can often as easily fuel our biases as they moderate them.

All the cities you mention are tier one Potemkin cities.

Try go to the country side to see the real China.

For the racism part, I wouldn't say that signs with "no foreigners" in shops are common, but I have seen them a couple of times during my 5 year stay in China.

As someone who’s lived in China since 2012 up until the present day, things have changed markedly in the last few years, and especially since ~April of last year once it became clear that China was handling the pandemic better than the rest of the world.

Most people are still ok, but some fraction of the population has a mixture of fear and hatred of foreigners. They think foreigners are dangerous because we bring the virus. Far fewer places accept foreigners than before.

I love my life and my friends here, but walking down the street in a village and having a guy wearing an official-looking coat scream at you to “fuck off” has a way of souring one’s mood.

China has changed an awful lot even since 2012.

Can you imagine saying “ni hao” and asking for selfies with random Asian people on the street in whatever western country? It would be racist and demeaning as hell. That’s what they subjected you to, and you felt “special.”

I mostly give them a pass because they weren’t being malicious, just curious. I’ve spoken with plenty of people who literally had never talked to a foreigner before. Perhaps half the country has still never even seen a foreigner.

It’s definitely taken too far sometimes though.

I experienced this a lot in India, some part of eastern Europe and Balkan. Most of them asked nicely. Told me that they come from a very small town there is not much chances to meet foreigner. And I usually ok with it. Don't find it is racist. It is just curiosity of other culture.

It really depends on your race as a foreigner. Black and Indian foreigners will be treated worse than white foreigners. Asian foreigners…it really depends how Chinese they look.

It seems to get worse every year also. My first visit in 1999, foreigners were quite welcomed. Then it simply got more mundane from there. My visit twas chengdu in 2006 was fairly like you stated though.

I've had smaller hotels tell me they can't host foreigners due to some law that you need to have a star rating which they didn't. The only time I had problems booking a hotel was in Shanghai and Beijing though, in other cities there was never an issue.

Also I was always greeted with utter friendliness, so I don't get the everybody's xenophobic aspect. I do speak some (very basic) Mandarin though so maybe that helps with how you're treated.

Not speaking Chinese is probably a benefit, because what you don't know can't hurt you. I speak fairly fluent Mandarin, and have overheard a lot of very open racist and xenophobic sentiments expressed in conversations around me when the people presumably assumed i couldn't understand what they were saying.

It is true that people in China tend to be fairly polite, although when it blows up it tends to go straight to 11. (I saw a lot of this happening between police and residents during the coronavirus lockdowns.) But just because people are polite, don't assume that means they're not bigots. In some parts of the country, particularly amongst more affluent people, there is a sort of attitude that foreigners should be treated with kid gloves, which is thoroughly degrading.

As a Chinese who grew up in a very small city in the west, I think you are completely right. The more developed areas is, the more open they are. And so on to the teenagers compare elders. At least in the surface. However, as the government turns to be more close(I don’t know how to describe it more correct but i believe you know) when Xi gets the power, even the teenagers become more racist and xenophobic while I am an undergraduate seen. IMO, probably that’s because most of them could only receive the Internet in China(which we always consider it as a LAN): everything in the world has a “Chinese special edition”. After all, IMO, it’s able to come to China in some big cities with a VPN or something across the firewall since nobody can stay away to internet these days. Thus you will get a experience not too bad, and China is like most any other countries. But just stay in the urban area. What’s more, you know it’s not a good time to visit during pandemic, and i think racist and xenophobic been much more during these time. I don’t know what the china being tomorrow, but i’m pessimistic. Sorry for my bad english.

Facing discrimination when you are foreigner is pretty common in most countries. I think if you are from the white diaspora you wouldn't have noticed in the western countries but every time a friend (I am from India) goes to countries in NA & EU, there is almost always some form of discrimination preventing access to service or being overcharged without legal intervention.

I've been to many hotels across the United States and Europe over a number of years in cities of all sizes and can honestly say have never even felt the remote possibility of being denied a room. Also Indian/Pakistani.

Edit: to be clear, I'm not trying to deny your own experience or making any accusations here. I'm just presenting the other side and clarifying that I don't feel it's a universal experience.

America has its own class of problems that get exaggerated or overblown, such as how dangerous it is.

"White diaspora" is blowing my mind a bit. I think I would have been slapped by my social studies teachers if I ever used that phrase to describe colonialism. (I'm white, US)

Visiting or living in foreign countries for business or tourism is not "colonialism".

Nice of you to assume that all white people had a chance to colonise (rather than be colonised and conquered by neighbouring nations on a regular basis). I'm not carrying the sins of the English-speaking (or otherwise formerly colonising) nations, so could the whites == colonialism assumption stay wherever other such weird assumptions belong.

European diaspora is an accepted term[1]. Yes there's a redirect, but the word "diaspora" is used in the very first paragraph. It's ok, Europeans are people too. There's nothing offensive about the term. Plenty of "colonials" were sentenced to transportation, they didn't choose it.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_diaspora

You can take solace in the fact that "whites" will never again command such societies in the future. The exaggerated "colonialism" narrative comes off as pining for a long-lost era of dominance, but in a socially acceptable way.

The era of Northern Europeans ("whites") dominating the globe is over forever, so no need to beat yourself up about it. Just letting you know that this extreme narrative is quite bizarre to non-Americans.

Yes, foreigners need to register their address. I did that in UK every time I move when I was under student visa. If you fail to register within 7 days or so, you will be hit with a fine and other consequences. I also need to fill in my address in US every time I visit US. I assume it is normal for people traveling to westerns, but not very normal for westerners themselves. Most tourism countries, hotels do registration for you, sometimes you fill an extra form when you check in.

Depends on where she lived. Beijing, Shanghai and other first tier cities are ok for foreigners. The further away you get, the more blurry situation gets.

Where did you get this from? US hotels most definitely do not “register (resident or non-resident) guests with the local government”.

A few states require hotel guests to present an ID at checkin.

We usually do have to present ID these days, but more importantly a credit card. There is no registration with the police as you say, America has nothing like the hukou system either.

How can you tell if a hotel registers you with the local government? I am not saying they are (never bothered to cross the Atlantic) but you have no way of knowing what they do.

My assumption is they all do, directly or not. I mean, 2013 did happen. Guess not everyone was paying attention

Spoken like someone who's never spent any time in or around the US service industry. People will gossip, and something like this would be known - hell, I'd likely know it, just on account of knowing some folks who would know and would want to talk about it. I don't live in a tech monoculture, either geographically or socially, and I'm friendly, personable, and good at explaining complex systems simply. Because of that I get a lot of questions from acquaintances about everything from phone and PC repair to what human life might look like after a hard-takeoff singularity. Those conversations go lots of places, but often tend to converge on people's worries about tech in general, as they take the chance of a discussion with someone knowledgeable to check their anxieties against reality. So the surprise, if this were happening, would be more that by now someone hadn't mentioned it, over drinks or otherwise, in my hearing.

That said, I don't find that lack at all surprising. What you're thinking of here is more of a Stasi-style "informers everywhere" kind of deal, and US domestic mass surveillance really doesn't work that way. Much more likely would be something like NSA watching payment card transactions en masse for debits from hotels and associating those with cell tower and identity data, and maybe also having quietly penetrated the major booking systems to spot cash purchases. In light of Snowden's 2013 revelations, it wouldn't surprise me to hear about either of those, and indeed I assume they are both being done. (Not least because that's probably how I'd build it. Why deal openly with a bunch of separate businesses and fractious employees when you can much more quietly and easily learn all you want from what's going over the wire?)

And aside from all that - not for nothing is it so common a theme in our popular media, especially these last couple of decades, that by and large we'd really just rather not know. You've mentioned that you don't really understand America, and that checks out; if you did, you'd neither be surprised that the response to Snowden was mostly a yawn, nor need telling anything I've said in this comment. Our intelligence agencies certainly don't.

If you pay cash, you pretty much uniformly have to show ID, no? I don't think it is possible to book a room without identifying yourself.

This might not be reported to the state, but I feel like it definitely could be subpoenad by the state.

The “local government” are my neighbors the Sheriff and the County Commissioner.

Then there are freedom of information requests, journalist, whistleblowers working for local government, and whistleblowers working for hotels.

If the Sheriff knew who you were and had probable cause he could get a warrant to get your credit card transactions from your bank and from that see you were in a hotel.

But that’s pretty far away from “hotels register you with the local government.”

There was actually a hotel owner who took it on himself to report suspected undocumented immigrants to ICE a few years ago. We know about it because it quickly made its way to the papers, and caused an enormous uproar.

remind me, what happened in 2013?

Check out this Snowden guy. He made some uncomfortable revelations

The hell you talking about. I've been to roughly 40 states, and am "non-white" and have never had to do this shit at any hotel

You don't have to show your ID to check in?

What? The US doesn't require anyone to register with the local government when traveling, foreigner or US citizen. Where are you getting this kind of misinformation?

Chinese misinformation campaign?

going through whimsicalisms posts, and it's actually hard to build a picture of state-run propaganda. They talk about Taiwanese independence like it's a given, for example. This could possibly be a cultural misunderstanding.

Never attribute to malice etc.

I don't know about the us, but in some places in Europe , the police or a security agency passes by daily to pick up a form that's filled out when checking in.

Source, friend worked in a hotel and I have seen it with my own eyes.