This American Made a Film About the “White Monkey” Trade, Where a White Face in China Is the Whole Job

“The moment a foreigner stands there, everything changes — it's no longer some house in a remote mountain village, it's a future international city.”

In 2012, David Borenstein, from Miami, was wandering near Jiuyan Bridge in Chengdu when two agents walked up and asked whether he had any talents, saying they had an event they wanted to invite him to. It was David's second year in Chengdu, and he had long since lost count of how many such invitations he'd had. This time, out of curiosity, he decided to try it.

Before long, David was booked to play clarinet at a real-estate opening ceremony, though he had never touched a clarinet in his life and could only mime along, copying what he saw. A few other foreigners performed onstage with him, and they had exactly one thing in common — they were all white.

After the performance, they were led into a banquet hall where a forum was under way. A formally dressed host was introducing the master architect about to take the stage, the man who had designed the development. He, too, was white. Chatting with the “master architect” afterward, David found they had almost identical stories: spotted on the street, hired to play an assigned role.

That is how David — who had come to Sichuan as a Fulbright scholar to do anthropological research — ended up in the trade known as the “white monkey” business. (The Fulbright Program, founded in 1946, is a major educational exchange between the American and Chinese governments.) For foreigners who arrived in China around 2010, the term “white monkey” was all too familiar; it was often the icebreaker with other expats living in China. It also became part of David's doctoral research.

Over more than two years as a “white monkey,” David went to more than 50 Chinese cities — Guizhou, Xi'an, Gansu, Chengdu, Chongqing and the satellite towns around them — doing research and shooting a great deal of footage along the way. At the end of 2016, a documentary called Dream Empire premiered at the IDFA film festival. David made it.

Dream Empire follows Yana, a migrant worker who in 2010 built the largest foreigner-leasing company in Chongqing. Her business was simple. “The moment a foreigner stands there, everything changes. It's no longer some house a developer put up in a remote mountain area — it becomes a future international city,” Yana says, half mocking, at the start of the film. 2010 was exactly when Chinese real estate was growing at breakneck speed.

The “international” cities Yana talks about all carry a tint of utopian fantasy. You can tell from the names of the developments, which keep circling back to the same keywords: “paradise,” “European-style,” “royal,” “noble,” “Vienna.” David's verdict: “This is the most dramatic thing I've seen in the 21st century.”

The “white monkeys” in his footage, David argues, are a force this upheaval can't be understood without. They are cast as living proof of “internationalization, city building and the good life in the West.”

The work looks easy. Most of the time a “white monkey” only has to play a part, and a single song can pay 1,000 to 1,500 yuan. David once met a French backpacker in Chengdu who had been there five years; he played bass four times a month and spent the rest of his time taking bass lessons with the money. Today that Frenchman is a professional musician in Paris.

Another “white monkey's” path shows how the trade has moved. He has been doing this for more than 20 years — Taiwan 25 years ago, Beijing and Shanghai 15 years ago, Chengdu in the mid-2000s. He picked each city just as it was turning “international,” cashed in, then moved on to the next one.

What “white monkeys” complained about most was the five- to six-hour drive to each “commercial gig.” Back then, buses full of blond, blue-eyed foreigners regularly ran from Chengdu to Dazhou, Nanchong and places like them for events. The heat of the property boom was seeping downward, city by city.

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David was a “white monkey” with a stage name. He was “the world-renowned clarinetist David Borenstein,” a member of “the famous American band The Travelers” — a name that, as it happens, described his real situation well enough. The leasing company, thorough in its way, even shot a set of professional photos of him: clarinet in hand, turtleneck sweater, tweed suit. “It was so absurd, so stupid,” David says.

But the role was not fixed at musician. Whatever the developer needed, David became.

Once, a developer in Xi'an wanted him to play an official from the American consulate: at the opening ceremony David was to announce that then-U.S. president Barack Obama also supported the project. The developer even planned to make him a “consulate ID,” though for various reasons it never happened. Looking back, David calls that his “most dangerous” job.

On the whole his “acting career” went smoothly. Not one of the roles he played was ever questioned, which may sound hard to believe, since he was no Hollywood professional. Perhaps Chinese audiences saw through the bad performances and were too polite to say so. But David thinks the more likely explanation is symbolism: white performers and speakers usually went on right after the government officials and property developers had finished. “We were standing next to people with power and status. They represented authority, so we benefited from that by association. That's why almost no one questioned us.”

Cases this easy, and this reliably successful, quickly made white people a hot commodity for the leasing companies. The foreigner agencies David knew sent people into nightclubs and bars to find suitable foreigners, using one crude standard: looks.

It happened again and again. A professional saxophonist could not get a single performance job because he was Korean American. Nothing shows this racial pecking order more plainly than pay. After interviewing many performers, David found that people with blue eyes and blond hair were paid the most, while Black performers and anyone with darker skin got two-thirds less. “It's entirely about looks and race.”

Even among white people there was a pecking order. A friend of David's, a country music singer in the United States, came to visit Chengdu just as a themed event called “Country Night” was being planned, and David thought he would finally see a real musical performance. In the end the event planner didn't like his friend's looks and picked a white woman who couldn't sing at all but looked good. “It doesn't matter whether you have talent. As long as you look like a Westerner — a good-looking one — you're in.”

If the business had to be summed up in one line, it might be the bit of Sichuanese David learned, the sentence he speaks most fluently and most convincingly: “I'm American. What are you looking at?”

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David met Yana in the year the foreigner-leasing market in Chengdu was starting to saturate, and she was getting ready to open a white-people-leasing company in Chongqing. Yana is the film's protagonist, a young woman from Xinjiang who taught herself English to run the business and who also had to manage a crowd of white people who thought themselves above it all — a superiority that came from comparing themselves with their peers back home. “You all work so hard over there. Here I do nothing, live comfortably, and still make this much money.”

Yana probably didn't realize her business was only one piece of the “city image-building” industry: cities competing with one another, using every kind of publicity to construct an image.

She once took on a job for an “international water sports event” in a small town in Chongqing. The town wanted to build local tourism around water sports, and by the logic of the time — more white people equals more international — that was easy enough to arrange.

Yana rented a bus and brought 30 foreigners, David among them, to the town, where they staged an Olympic-style opening ceremony. The “international athletes” each carried a national flag and filed in one by one, while an official at the side read loudly from his speech: “This is a day of unprecedented pride in the history of sport in our city…”

David still remembers the faces in the audience that day. Most of them were local villagers.

Events like this, run with governments and property developers, made up most of Yana's business at the time. You would assume the margins were fat, but the competition was fiercer than she expected. The rules worked like show business: a property company with a need first called an event-planning company, which then went to a leasing company, and who finally “won the bid” came down largely to connections. Even when the white person she put forward was chosen, the profit, split across every layer, was not as generous as she had imagined. She held the business up by force of will until property prices crashed in 2014 and her Chongqing company all but folded — a situation no amount of effort on her part could turn around.

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The “white monkey” leasing market still exists, but the rules of the game have grown crueler.

Being stopped on the street is no longer common. Leasing companies now find Ukrainians and Russians on YouTube, fly them to China, take their passports the moment they land and sign them to long-term labor contracts. As a result, every side gets less out of it than before.

“2009 to 2012 was the golden age. Everyone was making money. After 2014 everything changed. It used to be white people who controlled the leasing companies; now it's the other way around,” David says.

“White monkeys” have also spread into more industries; real estate is no longer the guaranteed payday. You often see white faces on billboards along highways or in airports, faces that match what people picture when they picture an industry expert or a professional — but it is only a picture. In fact a small share of the business at the leasing companies David worked with came from exactly this kind of commercial advertising. Many of those white people were foreign English teachers in China, or ordinary people spotted on the street by “talent scouts,” as David had been.

The company Yana founded has been handed to her partner, Jimmy, who still runs the leasing side. In the past 80 to 90 percent of the clients were property developers; now it's under 50 percent, with the rest coming from work like fashion shows.

Every time he goes back to the United States, David enjoys telling friends about this stretch of his life. “It shocks them every time. They can't take it in, they think it's completely insane.”

David understands that really grasping the white-monkey business means understanding the culture, the politics, the official rhetoric and the fixation on GDP growth behind it. That is why he set out to make Dream Empire.

By coincidence, perhaps, the film premiered two weeks after the American election, and most of the discussion that followed circled around what China's white-monkey phenomenon might teach the United States. The idea raised most often was “post-truth”: rhetoric beating fact, people putting emotion and feeling first, evidence and fact second.

“Chinese officials and businessmen make people believe the illusion that a city is developing fast,” David says. What he cannot work out is this: “How exactly do we end up living in this fantasy world, and what else can we do?”

Only here does David return to his identity as a doctoral researcher and to his subject — how ideology spreads through a society. “We live inside the ultimate bubble, the internet,” he says. Over the coming year he plans to direct an eight-episode series called “The Internet Subverting Democracy,” about digital culture and the problems the internet has created for democracy.

His time in China showed David what a society is capable of: it can marshal enormous force to build real estate fast, even when the result satisfies no one. David often wonders: “Why do we spend our time building ‘ghost cities'? What would happen if we put that same energy into curing cancer or saving the environment?”

There is no denying that David was once part of this scheme. He helped build the “ghost cities” too, and the guilt is hard to shake. When he first began preparing the film, he wanted to screen it for a Chinese audience, as a way of redeeming his part in it.

He probably won't get the chance. A Chinese producer he met told him the film now “absolutely crosses the line,” and no one is willing to bring it in.

“You're the first Chinese media outlet to interview me,” he said, sounding part excited, part deflated.

A clip from the film that David released in The New York Times

Cover image provided by the interviewee.