If you’re Chinese and want to impress clients or bureaucrats, what do you do? Hire a foreign executive-stand-in, of course. Hired by the day, week, or month, these out-of-work models and actors, or English teachers, are ready to accommodate you for what is variously called a "White Guy Window Dressing," "White Guy in a Tie," "Token White Guy Gig," or "Face Job."
“Face” is everything in China, but a white face in your employ implies money, prestige, and international connections. Need an impressive board member or CEO to shake hands? Rent a white guy. Need an international “partner” to give a speech? Rent a white guy. Want to impress people at a party you’re throwing? You get the picture.
It helps to be attractive and congenial, but a must is to look like you just got off the plane and to NOT speak Chinese, even if you can. If you’re asked a question through your translator, say whatever you like, and the translator will pretend to understand you and answer appropriately. Don’t worry about making up your identity, they’ll have that all worked out for you: name, title, length of time you’ve been doing your job, and, of course, business cards.
There are roles for white women, too, to pretend to be someone’s girlfriend or to appear as part of a foreign couple. In provincial areas of China, scads of housing projects have gone up with no one moving in. Solution? Throw a big event with a number of foreign couples milling about and suddenly the apartments have the cachet of being “international.”
It can get a little awkward, though, if you’re hired for something way out of your depth as in the case of Vicky Mohieddeen who was hired to pretend to be an oil tycoon. Mohieddeen, who is Scottish and knows nothing about the oil industry, was one of the “guests of honor” at an oil drilling conference in Shandong province.
"It’s part of what China is all about, you know," she told a CNN reporter. "There is quite an elaborate fantasy world going on here where, if everyone buys into it, it does not matter if it’s true.”
Mitch Moxley, who was paid $1,000 a month to be a fake businessman just because he’s white, seemed to concur. “It was pretty funny. The whole thing was a little bit surreal,” he told NPR.
