A British man was beaten up and arrested in Beijing after sexually harassing a Chinese girl on a public street.

Beijing authorities will start a 100-day sweeping campaign to tackle foreigners engaged in illegal employment, overstaying and illegal entry, said China Daily on May 14. The move is presumably associated with the case in which a British man tried to rape a Chinese girl last week.

In a nation once ravaged by foreign invasion during the late 19th century, people once repelled foreign cultures as perverted and noxious. But as economic reforms and opening up in the 1980s capitulated China out of isolation, the Chinese people began to look abroad and found a completely new world in which material richness abounded.

Xenocentricism generated and foreign brands of food, clothes and daily essentials soon fell in favor with the Chinese public. When choosing between domestic and foreign brands, many shoppers, especially the youth, would pick the latter, in part because of their quality assurance and exotic flavor.

Incoming foreign professionals seeking career opportunities brought ample resources of knowledge, expertise and skills, which helped facilitate China’s development in social and economic fronts. Foreign visitors have been a catalyst for deepening cultural exchanges, despite disparate lifestyles and potential culture shocks.

Statistics reveal that more than 27 million foreign people entered the Chinese mainland in 2011, an increase of two million over 2010. Other sources show that the number of inbound foreigners has been growing at an annual rate of ten percent since 2000.

Beijing was home to almost 120,000 foreigners at the end of 2011, second only to Shanghai in terms of the number of foreigners with residency permits.