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Audrey Jiajia Li

Reports of a female employee allegedly being assaulted at a drinking party in Hangzhou brought back a version of myself from more than a decade ago. Back then, I was one of those young women routinely invited to business dinners.
Seating followed an unwritten rule, with the most powerful person taking the seat of honour, flanked by two young women. Everyone knew what we were there to do: keep the conversation lively, entertain the guests and, above all, keep raising our glasses.
I’ve always been a terrible drinker. Yet under the familiar pressure – “Everyone else is drinking. Why aren’t you?” – I would force down a glass or two. I developed little tricks. Baijiu is clear, so I could sometimes discreetly spit it into a napkin without anyone noticing.
However, that didn’t always work. Once, I was told to drink what they called a “red apple”, or a full glass of red wine. There was nowhere to hide it. I drank it, blacked out later, vomited three or four times and spent the next day with a splitting headache.
What I remember most vividly is not the physical misery. It’s a strange sense of shame. Why could everyone else drink but I couldn’t?
The ability to drink was seen as an important professional skill. The women who could drink without flinching seemed admirable. They knew when to stand, whom to toast and, above all, how to manage the mood of the table. I felt that my own body and personality were holding me back.
Why was a young female employee expected to be at that dinner in the first place? What role was she expected to play at that table?

It never occurred to me that the problem was not my drinking capacity. Why did I need to prove I could drink? More importantly, why did I feel I had no right to refuse?
That feeling returned when I read about the Hangzhou incident. On July 26, after a business dinner related to a real estate project, a young female employee was reportedly forced to drink large amounts of alcohol before being assaulted and injured at a karaoke lounge. On August 18, Hangzhou authorities announced Zhao Haifeng, general manager of China Merchants Shekou Industrial Zone Holdings’ Zhejiang branch, and Yu Tingdong, deputy head of Hangzhou’s Binjiang district, had been detained and removed from their positions over allegations they sexually assaulted the woman.
The case raises uncomfortable questions. Why was a young female employee expected to be at that dinner in the first place? What role was she expected to play at that table?
Perhaps she felt what I once felt. If your boss asks you to come, you come. If everyone drinks, you drink. If you are a young woman, you are expected to know how to keep the table happy. You worry about being seen as difficult. You worry about damaging a business relationship. Even when your body tells you no, you raise the glass anyway.
That is one of the most insidious things about drinking culture. It doesn’t always need an explicit command. Power itself can function as an order. That is why I don’t think the Hangzhou case can simply be dismissed as a drunken indiscretion.
Business drinking has deep roots in China. A dinner table is rarely just a place to eat. It can be a place to build relationships, exchange information, protect interests and allocate resources.
China’s anti-corruption campaigns and the “eight-point rules” introduced after 2012 have curbed lavish official banquets and publicly funded extravagance. Formal regulations can curb excess, but they are much less effective at changing how power operates around a dinner table.

Perhaps the most stubborn thing is not the feast itself but the hierarchy behind it. That is what makes the Hangzhou case particularly jarring. Hangzhou is one of China’s most modern and dynamic cities, famous for a new generation of technology start-ups known as the “Six Little Dragons”.
However, modern administrative procedures do not automatically produce modern power relations. A city can make entrepreneurs jump through fewer bureaucratic hoops without making it any easier for a young employee to look across a dinner table and simply say, “No, I don’t drink.”
When I was attending those dinners, China’s economy was booming. Business dinners became part of the machinery of deal-making, and drinking was the price of admission. The world has changed since then, but the Hangzhou incident is a reminder that some things change much more slowly than economic cycles.
Perhaps that is why the story resonates so strongly. It is not simply because we recognise that table. It is because so many of us have sat at one.


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Opinion

China Opinion

News

China

The alleged assault of a female employee in Hangzhou exposes how such unsavoury practices persist amid Beijing’s anti-extravagance campaign


The alleged assault of a female employee in Hangzhou exposes how such unsavoury practices persist amid Beijing’s anti-extravagance campaign.


Women and gender

5050

Hangzhou

Expresses the views, ideas and conclusions of the author. (Eg. Enough of Crazy Rich Asians, think of crazy poor Hongkongers.)


Forcing women to drink at business dinners has no place in modern China

.css-1c6uqr6{color:inherit;font-weight:inherit;font-size:inherit;font-family:inherit;line-height:inherit;overflow-wrap:break-word;}The alleged assault of a female employee in Hangzhou exposes how such unsavoury practices persist amid Beijing’s anti-extravagance campaign

The alleged assault of a female employee in Hangzhou exposes how such unsavoury practices persist amid Beijing’s anti-extravagance campaign