A party of Chinese men and women upset local diners at a restaurant in Seoul’s Myeongdong District by engaging in lewd sexual behavior at the table. The group ignored complaints about the disturbance and eventually had to be reseated.
In attendance at the Feb. 23 dinner were three Chinese diplomats stationed in Korea, including Consul Wang Xianmin, South Korea’s JTBC Television reported on Feb. 26.
The party, numbering over a dozen people, had devolved into a drunken din. Several of the men made obscene contact with the women sitting around them, and their moans were audible throughout the restaurant.
“In addition to kissing, caressing, and men burying their faces in female bosoms … some of the women sat in the men’s laps,” ChinaGate, a major overseas Chinese-language news outlet, reported.
About thirty other customers were in the restaurant, including high school girls and young children.
One witness interviewed by JTBC saw a woman in the party wearing the torso piece of a traditional Korean dress.
The licentiousness spilled into the restroom when a man and woman went in there together in an intoxicated state, a high school girl at the restaurant said. The couple’s sounds of ecstasy could be heard from outside, she told JTBC.
The party was reseated after complaints from other customers at the family restaurant. Staff said that the party had come from the Chinese embassy.
According to the JTBC report, Consul Wang Xianmin is an expert with over ten years in Sino-Korean relations, while the other two are lesser diplomats stationed at the embassy.
Koreans were enraged by the reports, which soon made it to the top of web traffic lists on Duam, a major Korean net portal. Internet users left 1,700 comments within four hours of the JTBC broadcast.
Already-weak ties between China and South Korea could only suffer from the scandalous incident, the JTBC report said.
“How can such people represent their country as diplomats?” one angry netizen wrote. “They humiliate their own nation and won’t gain any respect from other countries.”
“These diplomats of the Chinese Communist Party are on the same level as hoodlums, the restaurant boss should have reported this to the police,” another said. “To have this sort of promiscuous behavior in a restaurant is sin.”
“High in position, low in nature,” said one user with regard to the diplomats.
Chinese netizen reactions were mixed. Some expressed shame at the incident, while others rebuked the Koreans.
“Why have the Korean gooks suddenly become so conservative?” one slur-slinging Chinese user wrote. “This is a common occurrence in China, there’s nothing special about it.”
A more critical comment goes: “You’re a diplomat in a foreign country but you can’t control the lower half of your body. How about you do surgery and become a eunuch first?”
One lampooned the communist system by parodying the iconic propaganda song “The East Is Red.” “The Communist Party has undergone highly advanced sexual education and has a powerful libido. They'll do it wherever they go. The Communist Party is like the sun, shining wherever it goes.”
“This incident tells us that when barbarian lowlifes hold power, they make a huge mess around the world,” a Korean web user wrote. “The Korean authorities and common citizens should all realize this.”
It’s not the first time Chinese embassy staff have been in the media spotlight by unwelcome behavior in Korea. In May 2008, a worker at the Chinese consulate in the city of Gwangju was stopped by police when he caused an accident while driving drunk. He was detained after he tried to kick the officers.
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