Introduction: Opportunities and Challenges
There was a time, in the period that followed China's post-Cultural Revolution gradual opening up, where simply being a foreigner could mean being offered coveted positions at Chinese companies and the market was rife with business opportunities.
Fast forward a few decades and plenty of companies and people have jumped on the China wagon. It is an increasingly frequent destination for travel, study abroad and gap years. There has been so much investment in China that its economy has grown outrageously and its currency has increased in value so significantly that the only reason why companies aren't moving manufacturing to places where it would be cheaper, like Bangladesh and Burma, is because of concerns about political instability and having their investments "nationalized," as has actually happened in Vietnam.
At the same time, China's middle class has come into existence, China's rich have become even richer and opportunities to sell to new internal Chinese markets are growing.
In summary, China is no longer an easy place to make a fortune. In fact, it has never been a place where outsiders could count on making a fortune. Their foreignness gave them an easy foot in the door, a fast track in the rat race, and a fat expat compensation package but that was about it. Fortunes have always been made the old fashioned way, even in China, even for trendy, foreign white men.
However, the amount of challenge that comes into being a truly skilled expat in China is huge. Those who struggle through the hurdles will have little competition. Given the size of the Chinese population and economy, there will probably never be enough highly skilled foreigners to go around, for the jobs that truly require one.
Why Outsiders Are Needed
It's important to realize that for most jobs in China, foreigners are absolutely not needed. The average wage in most tier one or tier two cities for recent Chinese graduates of (both Chinese and Western) universities is about $200USD a month. With an excess number of university graduates in China looking to score a job that offers potential growth, manufacturing positions are starting to often pay more than entry level positions for university graduates.
So, unless you offer something as a foreigner that no one in China can, they'd sooner hire a local to do it for next to nothing.
Western Investments
One of the key markets for highly skilled experts on China are the firms looking to invest in China. Any sort of legal investment in China tends to be a very complicated affair, so anyone who has had a go at it will have quickly come to appreciate how important it is to have people on your side who know what they are doing and can save you countless months and thousands of dollars.
The problem for investors who hire native Chinese to fight their battles for them is that good help is hard to find. The blunt truth is that most Chinese who have spent the majority of their existence in China have a fairly low opinion of outsiders and therefore can't be counted on to do what is asked of them. They may choose to do things the "Chinese way" while providing inadequate feedback along the way.
Investors may find themselves wondering if the local experts that they have hired in China are working for them or for the bureaucrats and business people who keep throwing up seemingly endless road blocks.
This is why there is demand for outsiders who know how to get things done in China. Westerners who play the middle ground are much more likely to appreciate the concerns and frustrations that their Western employers are experiencing and will be more honest when it comes to being upfront about where a business situation is really at.
For a Western business owner with hundreds of thousands of dollars on the line, this service is invaluable.
Chinese Companies
Many, many Chinese companies provide goods and services to entities outside of China. Chinese sales people on a typical Chinese salary are never going to have the finesse of a Western sales person or marketing specialist when selling Chinese products in the West.
For profit generating positions where the ability to speak fully fluent English is going to correlate with making successful sales, there is no substitute for an outsider.
The Skills and Experience Needed
Chinese Language
To be of service in China simply being a native English speaking outsider isn't going to cut it. Even if you are able to generate massive sales, that won't do much for a company that can't communicate with you.
Many companies have English speaking Chinese employees. But you'd be surprised how hard it is to actually discuss detailed aspects of a sale strategy with them. They may have the vocabulary for very specific discussions (what time do you get up in the morning?) but the won't likely have the nuance to allow for quality communication. Also, most older bosses don't speak English, so you'll always be going through a mind-man.
Suffice to say, Chinese language skills are the most universally recommendable resume builder for China.
Chinese, however, is really hard, if you want to speak it fluently. Also, if you plan to work near or in Hong Kong or in the Shanghai area, you might be much, much more useful if you speak more than one Chinese language.
I once read a story about a consultant in China whose language skills struck fear into the hearts of Chinese factory owners in the Shanghai area.
But Chinese is really hard, especially if you plan to speak it very well.
This article is the best thing I've ever read on the topic.
Some highlights:
General China Knowledge
To avoid seeming like a small, stupid child, you'll need to know your way around China and be up-to-date on knowledge that every Chinese person has.
Learning Chinese is going to make this much easier, so that needs to be priority number one. Spending a significant amount of time in China (years) and familiarizing yourself with several locales is going to be very useful.
You'll also have to study basic Chinese history and be familiar with historical figures and creators of arts and literature as well as modern day stars, politicians and key public figures.
Sales Skills
Once you speak the language, you'll have to actual have some skills to offer employers that can help them generate revenue.
Sales, especially those targeting Western clients, is a real area of opportunity for expats looking for work in China. If you do make sales and earn your employer money, you'll probably end up making good
money as long as you are useful to your employer.
For those wishing to go this route, Shenzhen is a great place to look for work.
Engineering, science skills
Hard science and engineer skills will be useful in China, but only if the value you bring offers five times that of local employees, as they get paid starting salaries five times lower than the least that an expat will accept.
There are a lot of niche market opportunities that one might find themselves in, but it isn't going to happen overnight.
Experience needed: Management opportunities
Chinese HR professionals tend to be very by the book. That means that to even be considered for a management role, you'll need a minimum of 3-4 years of experience, following graduating from an undergraduate program. They don't count experience prior to your graduation date.
Reality: Starting salaries are going to suck
If you are looking to get a good paying job right off the bat in China, think again. Most entry level positions only pay about $12,000USD to $20,400USD per year. This is actually what you can earn teaching English with no skills and just a university in literally any field.
The good news is that as a foreigner, you are likely to get promoted faster than your Chinese coworkers. Also, if you prove your worth in terms of actual revenue, you'll make a lot more money.
But you can anticipate having to start off at the bottom end of the spectrum with barely enough income to make student loan payments and definitely not enough earnings to live a lavish lifestyle.
Looking for a traditional job
Step One: Learn Chinese
Most people will need to put in at least three years in China to get to a respectable level of fluency. This won't happen naturally for most people. It'll require taking classes (not very expensive at Chinese universities) or dedicated self-study.
You'll need to have Chinese friends to practice with. For ultimate success, at some point (the earlier the better), start refusing to speak any English and only speak Chinese.
Going to China to teach English or do other work while learning Chinese on the side rarely results in much success.
Better to take Chinese classes full time to start, which will get you your visa, live cheap, and support your expenses with about 10 hours of part time English teaching on the side, under the table.
It's better to learn Chinese before you go after a university degree, because it'll be hard to manage school debt, the minimum monthly payments might be more than your monthly living expenses, while studying in China.
Step Two: Get a university degree
To be able to acquire a work visa and be considered for many job positions, an undergraduate degree is necessary.
This can happen before, after or in tandem with your Chinese language study, but at some point you'll need to get it done.
Step Three: Accept whatever work you can find and build several years of experience
Nothing replaces several years of working experience in China. First, it'll open the door to a lot of promotion opportunities as a foreigners. Second, you'll learn a lot. Third, it really matters to HR reps.
Run your own business
In my opinion, this is where the real potential is. Unless you are very lucky, even good paying expat jobs aren't going to make you rich. The real money isn't in making someone else wealthy, it's in doing something where are you will reap the benefits of your success and take responsibility for your failures.
If this is your goal, you'll still need to learn Chinese and getting a university degree may help when it comes to acquiring work or business visas, but your main challenge will be in creating an idea that no one else has thought of or can do and turning it into a profitable business.
Keep in mind, establishing a legal business in China is a huge pain in the ass and requires having a huge amount of investment capital on the books ($20,000-$80,000USD). You're more likely to want to start off as an illegitimate business and just stay off the radar of the local authorities until you have the financial backing to go legit.
Export is less risky, since you technically aren't "working" in China, just buying,
However, the real money in the future will probably be in selling to Chinese markets, so doing business with this goal in mind can be legally risky, even if you go through all the right channels.
In China, everyone wants their cut and if they aren't getting it, they may put up roadblocks until they do.
Teaching English
While hardly a long term job prospect for anyone who doesn't enjoy being bored out of their mind, teaching English is a great way to earn cash with the minimum amount of effort, while you build something more profitable and long term.
Working full-time is a big pain in the ass, but working under the table while you study Chinese or try to get a non-cash flow generating business going, is a reasonable activity.
Going rates are between $20-$40USD / hour for part time teaching.
You can collect private clients or work part time at an established school.
A full time salary generally has the advantage of offering a visa, but requires having a university degree and only pays what you would earn if you worked about 15 hrs a week part time.
Conclusion
Building a career in China isn't easy. Like anywhere, it'll take years to build the basic experience needed to be highly successful.
That being said, if you are successful, you'll be able to make money while living in a country with lower living expenses, feminine women and extremely inexpensive alcohol.
For answers to specific questions, PM me or post below.
NOTE: I've placed this in the Lifestyle section in preference to the Travel section. Mods can feel free to move it, but I believe that it has little to do with travel and much more to do with business, money and lifestyle management.
There was a time, in the period that followed China's post-Cultural Revolution gradual opening up, where simply being a foreigner could mean being offered coveted positions at Chinese companies and the market was rife with business opportunities.
Fast forward a few decades and plenty of companies and people have jumped on the China wagon. It is an increasingly frequent destination for travel, study abroad and gap years. There has been so much investment in China that its economy has grown outrageously and its currency has increased in value so significantly that the only reason why companies aren't moving manufacturing to places where it would be cheaper, like Bangladesh and Burma, is because of concerns about political instability and having their investments "nationalized," as has actually happened in Vietnam.
At the same time, China's middle class has come into existence, China's rich have become even richer and opportunities to sell to new internal Chinese markets are growing.
In summary, China is no longer an easy place to make a fortune. In fact, it has never been a place where outsiders could count on making a fortune. Their foreignness gave them an easy foot in the door, a fast track in the rat race, and a fat expat compensation package but that was about it. Fortunes have always been made the old fashioned way, even in China, even for trendy, foreign white men.
However, the amount of challenge that comes into being a truly skilled expat in China is huge. Those who struggle through the hurdles will have little competition. Given the size of the Chinese population and economy, there will probably never be enough highly skilled foreigners to go around, for the jobs that truly require one.
Why Outsiders Are Needed
It's important to realize that for most jobs in China, foreigners are absolutely not needed. The average wage in most tier one or tier two cities for recent Chinese graduates of (both Chinese and Western) universities is about $200USD a month. With an excess number of university graduates in China looking to score a job that offers potential growth, manufacturing positions are starting to often pay more than entry level positions for university graduates.
So, unless you offer something as a foreigner that no one in China can, they'd sooner hire a local to do it for next to nothing.
Western Investments
One of the key markets for highly skilled experts on China are the firms looking to invest in China. Any sort of legal investment in China tends to be a very complicated affair, so anyone who has had a go at it will have quickly come to appreciate how important it is to have people on your side who know what they are doing and can save you countless months and thousands of dollars.
The problem for investors who hire native Chinese to fight their battles for them is that good help is hard to find. The blunt truth is that most Chinese who have spent the majority of their existence in China have a fairly low opinion of outsiders and therefore can't be counted on to do what is asked of them. They may choose to do things the "Chinese way" while providing inadequate feedback along the way.
Investors may find themselves wondering if the local experts that they have hired in China are working for them or for the bureaucrats and business people who keep throwing up seemingly endless road blocks.
This is why there is demand for outsiders who know how to get things done in China. Westerners who play the middle ground are much more likely to appreciate the concerns and frustrations that their Western employers are experiencing and will be more honest when it comes to being upfront about where a business situation is really at.
For a Western business owner with hundreds of thousands of dollars on the line, this service is invaluable.
Chinese Companies
Many, many Chinese companies provide goods and services to entities outside of China. Chinese sales people on a typical Chinese salary are never going to have the finesse of a Western sales person or marketing specialist when selling Chinese products in the West.
For profit generating positions where the ability to speak fully fluent English is going to correlate with making successful sales, there is no substitute for an outsider.
The Skills and Experience Needed
Chinese Language
To be of service in China simply being a native English speaking outsider isn't going to cut it. Even if you are able to generate massive sales, that won't do much for a company that can't communicate with you.
Many companies have English speaking Chinese employees. But you'd be surprised how hard it is to actually discuss detailed aspects of a sale strategy with them. They may have the vocabulary for very specific discussions (what time do you get up in the morning?) but the won't likely have the nuance to allow for quality communication. Also, most older bosses don't speak English, so you'll always be going through a mind-man.
Suffice to say, Chinese language skills are the most universally recommendable resume builder for China.
Chinese, however, is really hard, if you want to speak it fluently. Also, if you plan to work near or in Hong Kong or in the Shanghai area, you might be much, much more useful if you speak more than one Chinese language.
I once read a story about a consultant in China whose language skills struck fear into the hearts of Chinese factory owners in the Shanghai area.
Quote:Quote:
...it is fairly common for someone to run ahead of him, screaming that he speaks Shanghainese so as to be sure that nobody reveals anything to him that he should not know.
But Chinese is really hard, especially if you plan to speak it very well.
This article is the best thing I've ever read on the topic.
Some highlights:
Quote:Quote:
Everyone's heard the supposed fact that if you take the English idiom "It's Greek to me" and search for equivalent idioms in all the world's languages to arrive at a consensus as to which language is the hardest, the results of such a linguistic survey is that Chinese easily wins as the canonical incomprehensible language. (For example, the French have the expression "C'est du chinois", "It's Chinese", i.e., "It's incomprehensible". Other languages have similar sayings.) So then the question arises: What do the Chinese themselves consider to be an impossibly hard language? You then look for the corresponding phrase in Chinese, and you find Gēn tiānshū yíyàng 跟天书一样 meaning "It's like heavenly script."
Quote:Quote:
Because the writing system is ridiculous.
Beautiful, complex, mysterious -- but ridiculous. I, like many students of Chinese, was first attracted to Chinese because of the writing system, which is surely one of the most fascinating scripts in the world. The more you learn about Chinese characters the more intriguing and addicting they become. The study of Chinese characters can become a lifelong obsession, and you soon find yourself engaged in the daily task of accumulating them, drop by drop from the vast sea of characters, in a vain attempt to hoard them in the leaky bucket of long-term memory.
General China Knowledge
To avoid seeming like a small, stupid child, you'll need to know your way around China and be up-to-date on knowledge that every Chinese person has.
Learning Chinese is going to make this much easier, so that needs to be priority number one. Spending a significant amount of time in China (years) and familiarizing yourself with several locales is going to be very useful.
You'll also have to study basic Chinese history and be familiar with historical figures and creators of arts and literature as well as modern day stars, politicians and key public figures.
Sales Skills
Once you speak the language, you'll have to actual have some skills to offer employers that can help them generate revenue.
Sales, especially those targeting Western clients, is a real area of opportunity for expats looking for work in China. If you do make sales and earn your employer money, you'll probably end up making good
money as long as you are useful to your employer.
For those wishing to go this route, Shenzhen is a great place to look for work.
Engineering, science skills
Hard science and engineer skills will be useful in China, but only if the value you bring offers five times that of local employees, as they get paid starting salaries five times lower than the least that an expat will accept.
There are a lot of niche market opportunities that one might find themselves in, but it isn't going to happen overnight.
Experience needed: Management opportunities
Chinese HR professionals tend to be very by the book. That means that to even be considered for a management role, you'll need a minimum of 3-4 years of experience, following graduating from an undergraduate program. They don't count experience prior to your graduation date.
Reality: Starting salaries are going to suck
If you are looking to get a good paying job right off the bat in China, think again. Most entry level positions only pay about $12,000USD to $20,400USD per year. This is actually what you can earn teaching English with no skills and just a university in literally any field.
The good news is that as a foreigner, you are likely to get promoted faster than your Chinese coworkers. Also, if you prove your worth in terms of actual revenue, you'll make a lot more money.
But you can anticipate having to start off at the bottom end of the spectrum with barely enough income to make student loan payments and definitely not enough earnings to live a lavish lifestyle.
Looking for a traditional job
Step One: Learn Chinese
Most people will need to put in at least three years in China to get to a respectable level of fluency. This won't happen naturally for most people. It'll require taking classes (not very expensive at Chinese universities) or dedicated self-study.
You'll need to have Chinese friends to practice with. For ultimate success, at some point (the earlier the better), start refusing to speak any English and only speak Chinese.
Going to China to teach English or do other work while learning Chinese on the side rarely results in much success.
Better to take Chinese classes full time to start, which will get you your visa, live cheap, and support your expenses with about 10 hours of part time English teaching on the side, under the table.
It's better to learn Chinese before you go after a university degree, because it'll be hard to manage school debt, the minimum monthly payments might be more than your monthly living expenses, while studying in China.
Step Two: Get a university degree
To be able to acquire a work visa and be considered for many job positions, an undergraduate degree is necessary.
This can happen before, after or in tandem with your Chinese language study, but at some point you'll need to get it done.
Step Three: Accept whatever work you can find and build several years of experience
Nothing replaces several years of working experience in China. First, it'll open the door to a lot of promotion opportunities as a foreigners. Second, you'll learn a lot. Third, it really matters to HR reps.
Run your own business
In my opinion, this is where the real potential is. Unless you are very lucky, even good paying expat jobs aren't going to make you rich. The real money isn't in making someone else wealthy, it's in doing something where are you will reap the benefits of your success and take responsibility for your failures.
If this is your goal, you'll still need to learn Chinese and getting a university degree may help when it comes to acquiring work or business visas, but your main challenge will be in creating an idea that no one else has thought of or can do and turning it into a profitable business.
Keep in mind, establishing a legal business in China is a huge pain in the ass and requires having a huge amount of investment capital on the books ($20,000-$80,000USD). You're more likely to want to start off as an illegitimate business and just stay off the radar of the local authorities until you have the financial backing to go legit.
Export is less risky, since you technically aren't "working" in China, just buying,
However, the real money in the future will probably be in selling to Chinese markets, so doing business with this goal in mind can be legally risky, even if you go through all the right channels.
In China, everyone wants their cut and if they aren't getting it, they may put up roadblocks until they do.
Teaching English
While hardly a long term job prospect for anyone who doesn't enjoy being bored out of their mind, teaching English is a great way to earn cash with the minimum amount of effort, while you build something more profitable and long term.
Working full-time is a big pain in the ass, but working under the table while you study Chinese or try to get a non-cash flow generating business going, is a reasonable activity.
Going rates are between $20-$40USD / hour for part time teaching.
You can collect private clients or work part time at an established school.
A full time salary generally has the advantage of offering a visa, but requires having a university degree and only pays what you would earn if you worked about 15 hrs a week part time.
Conclusion
Building a career in China isn't easy. Like anywhere, it'll take years to build the basic experience needed to be highly successful.
That being said, if you are successful, you'll be able to make money while living in a country with lower living expenses, feminine women and extremely inexpensive alcohol.
For answers to specific questions, PM me or post below.
NOTE: I've placed this in the Lifestyle section in preference to the Travel section. Mods can feel free to move it, but I believe that it has little to do with travel and much more to do with business, money and lifestyle management.
I'm the King of Beijing!
![[Image: tongue.gif]](https://rooshvforum.network/images/smilies/tongue.gif)
