Why don't you search out the story in question, but I expect you will retort with some criticism of China to deflect. You are the only foreigner I know who wasted 5,000 euros in China btw, makes for quite an amusing story in the local pub round here, I printed your post off and all the expats and FT's were in tears of laughter, lol

Obviously, you have no experience of any business in China beyond teaching then. People have lost a lot more than 20,000 euros for various reasons. Some through faults of their own, some through being deceived. Believe it or not, some foreigners deal with sums of money far higher than what a teaching job can provide.

One of my Chinese friends has recently lost a lot more than that due to problems with her business partners and she isn't even a foreigner.

Besides, if you are the kind of person that spends all of their time in those foreigner bars, well... that says it all.

Most foreigners that have been here a while, learn to see these kinds of places for what they are after a while, you know? Paying excessively high prices for beer and shagging disease ridden, gold-digging foreigner groupies just isn't the one. But once you actually learn to speak Chinese, you've got quite a world to explore outside of those places.