This is some pretty cool reading for those of you still trying to shake the post-public holiday major Bafana let down cobwebs.

If you’re a white guy in Beijing incapable of speaking a shred of Mandarin, you might feel that your employment opportunities are limited.

Or you could get off your ass and get paid to be a pretend CEO for a week, as long as you look like this guy:

The Atlantic has a great story about a young gentleman who gets to be a CEO, or any other variety of business executive in China with absolutely zippo training or skills, besides the ability to smarm the real business people in the room.

Here’s an extract.

Not long ago I was offered work as a quality-control expert with an American company in China I’d never heard of. No experience necessary—which was good, because I had none. I’d be paid $1,000 for a week, put up in a fancy hotel, and wined and dined in Dongying, an industrial city in Shandong province I’d also never heard of. The only requirements were a fair complexion and a suit.

“I call these things ‘White Guy in a Tie’ events,” a Canadian friend of a friend named Jake told me during the recruitment pitch he gave me in Beijing, where I live. “Basically, you put on a suit, shake some hands, and make some money. We’ll be in ‘quality control,’ but nobody’s gonna be doing any quality control. You in?”

I was.

And so I became a fake businessman in China, an often lucrative gig for underworked expatriates here.

Pretty darn hectique. You can read the whole thing here.