Foreign Babes in Beijing
television series
Foreign Babes in Beijing, subtitled Behind the Scenes of a New China, is a memoir published in 2005 by Rachel DeWoskin. The memoir details the author's personal experiences in Beijing from 1994 through 1999, during which time she lived in Beijing and watched the city grow and change as China modernized its economy.
The book's title is a reference to a soap opera in which DeWoskin appeared, Foreign Babes in Beijing (Chinese: 洋妞在北京, Yáng niū zài Běijīng), which features two pairs of Chinese men and American women. One pair features Rachel playing Jiexi, a seductress who lures away her married counterpart, Li Tianming; and the other features a more demure and traditional exchange student who falls in love with, and marries, Li Tianming's younger brother. Foreign Babes in Beijing was something of a cultural phenomenon in China, with a viewership of 600 million.
The memoir follows DeWoskin's life as well as her character's plotline, and has an attention to detail and cultural analysis which she inherited from her father, Kenneth DeWoskin, who was a noted Sinologist at the University of Michigan.
References
DeWoskin, Rachel (2005). Foreign Babes in Beijing: Behind the Scenes of a New China. New York: W. W. Norton & Company.
Begin with the source’s own compact description: “Foreign Babes in Beijing” is television series. The dossier treats that line as a proposition to test through Foreign, Babes and Beijing, not as a finished interpretation.
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Attribution, date and provenance are strongest when supported by the original work, a catalogue record and documented transmission. The source revision retrieved here is dated Mar 27, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q5468228. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 2005, 1994 and 1999.
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This entry incorporates text from “Foreign Babes in Beijing” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.