CHAPTER 2

Settling In

First Impressions

“What did I expect?” Richard Eardley, Asia Managing Director for global recruitment firm Hays, echoed my question as we started the interview in the summer of 2019. Expat journeys begin long before the screeching tires of a newly appointed manager’s flight touch down in a Chinese city. That watershed moment follows weeks or months of anticipation and preparation. Job descriptions are drafted, salary packages negotiated, kids pulled from schools, flights purchased, belongings boxed up, and shipped out in containers. Before relocation arrangements can even begin, candidates must face, digest, and accept the often-unexpected opportunity to work in China. Executives at my leadership workshops and coaching sessions often recalled hearing the news of such a possibility as the true beginning of their China story. Eventually, I made it a habit to start all my interviews by asking about that crucial moment, including the one with Richard. “What did I expect,” he savored the sentence once more before he made up his mind. “I have no idea.”

The admission might sound strange from the senior executive of a global firm that finds and moves thousands of talented people across continents each year. But cluelessness about China seems to be the rule rather than the exception at multinational headquarters. In advanced economies, one after another postwar generation lived their lives oblivious of the existence of People’s Republic even as they purchased products from Japan, Korea, Taiwan, and even the carved-out territories of Hong Kong and Macau. Despite China’s surging importance lately, many expats I met confessed that working there had hardly occurred to them before. Like many others, Renata Santos had another country in mind when she received the momentous offer. “My boss said, ‘I know that you dream of an international assignment, and we might have just the right thing for you.’ I was sure I would be offered Canada. When I heard China, I stiffened. I was completely terrified.” Such shock is understandable in the light of widespread stereotypes about China: Mao-suited cyclers, red-bannered rallies, pollution, and dog soup. Those who dismiss such cartoonish generalizations are either left with equally meaningless clichés of the Great Wall, skyscrapers, and the Long March space mission or—nothing.

“China was a blank slate to me,” Henrik König recalled. “Before that trip, I had never done business there or even met Chinese people.” Thanks to the tour that ThyssenKrupp arranged, he eventually arrived better informed than most newly appointed managers. Chris, a European luxury fashion brand’s Chief Financial Officer for Asia, told me in 2019 how it should not be done. “We have incoming expats whose only China experience was a Cantonese restaurant in Milan.” That was probably an exaggeration. They had probably watched a documentary on ghost towns in Inner Mongolia, read a Forbes article on Chinese billionaires, and uttered a multilingual no to the tourist who asked if the parking meter accepted WeChat Pay. International firms find it nearly impossible to hire professionals with an elementary understanding of China’s current reality. As opposed to Mexico, Japan, or even Russia, the People’s Republic has been a blank area in the world’s mental map for too long. Like Richard, most incoming managers simply do not know what to think. What is even more amusing is how this cluelessness may follow expats well beyond the first weeks of their assignment.

For two decades, I started leadership workshops, university lectures, and keynote speeches with an icebreaker I called China in One Word in homage to Yu Hua’s brilliant book China in Ten Words. I ask the visiting business, government, or academic delegations to compress their first impressions about the country into a single word. Initial remarks usually express approval and admiration. Dynamic. Growing. Futuristic. Booming. Amazing. It would be hard to argue with that in a meeting room 30 floors above a multimillion metropolis or surrounded by a hipster-style shared space. Modern China is like a three-dimensional exaggeration, whether you count the number of construction cranes, the mileage of railroads under construction, or the amount of money poured into artificial intelligence research. Visitors are advised to take their usual concepts of employee numbers, project budgets, and so forth, and multiply them by 10. Increasingly, it is not only the biggest but also the first. It was first to bridge a sea island, create a national virtual currency and crack quantum encryption for satellites. Local mobile phone apps that receive, pay, transfer, and invest money with a few clicks are digital windows into the future.

Fans always speak first. Sceptics slowly struggle through bottlenecks of self-censorship. Interesting is a frequent turning point: its disingenuity signals that the hard stuff is ready to pour forth. Confusing. Crowded. Stressful. Polluted. Brainwashed. Inhuman. They have a point too. International media teems with eye-catching news of environmental degradation, Orwellian state surveillance, confusion, corruption, and coercion in China. In supermarkets and comedy shows, it stands for cheap knockoffs and the exploited laborers who produce them. While in the country, my audience typically follows a ruthless pace of visits and meetings with little heed to their jetlag, touristic curiosity, or biological needs. Dodging motorcycle couriers on pedestrian pavements, rubbing shoulders (and other body parts) on public transport, they often realize there is something odd about local people. Something uncomfortable to contemplate and hard to discuss, raising the disturbing suspicion of being a closet racist. I love China in One Word for the way its internal struggles reveal as much about the players as about the place. I watch each character unfold and guess their China-compatibility. Who among them is ready for more?

The question is relevant because occasional business visits can turn into longer-term assignments. First impressions reveal a candidate’s ability to willingly take the China challenge and turn it into results. Foreigners with successful records in the country often recall how early insights guided them in solving problems later. Unfortunately, those insights also depend on when, how, and under what circumstances someone arrives in the country. And those circumstances can vary wildly indeed. Some expatriates I interviewed for this book were chauffeured from airports across top-tier cities to five-star compounds past saluting security guards. Others arrived in half-furnished factory lodgings closer in comfort to Beirut than Beijing. Some were on their first overseas assignment, others brought decades of experience from worldwide locations. Whichever way they saw it first, they judged China accordingly. As humans perceive new impulses through the filter of previous ones, mundane airport rides turned flashing images across car windows and the accompanying sounds, smells, smiles, frowns, sweaty crowds, or air-conditioned limousines into persistent judgment about what China was all about.

Relocation specialists take heed. Whenever I discuss the topic with those who send managers to China, I mention a few ways to make or break a newcomer’s first few weeks. A simple airport pickup can determine if someone lands into utter disaster or endless enchantment. “The company sent us a driver to the airport,” Renata told me. “I asked him in English what his name was. Instead of answering me, he called someone and started yelling into the phone. In minutes, I got a call from the HR lady, who said, ‘What did you say to this guy?’ I said nothing, I just asked his name. ‘No, don’t talk to him, he is really nervous around foreigners,’ she snapped at me. The driver started a similar quarrel with the doorman at the hotel. I thought about my visa interview the next day. Was I going to get the same treatment there?” Contrast that with Briana’s experience. “By the time I arrived, our relocation agency had set up my banking, Alipay and WeChat Pay accounts and arranged an apartment. I had no stress from the work side either. My local manager checked whether I had landed okay and got settled in. ‘Tell me when you’re ready to start working,’ his welcome text read. It was a strange feeling because I was paid without doing much for a while. But I realised that this was not just about work: it was about a complete life experience.”

However amazing a job relocation specialists do, factors like the climate are beyond their control. Most foreigner-friendly cities lie in sub-tropical zones, and even northern Beijing and Dalian have foully hot summers. Nevertheless, mainly to align with school schedules, too many expats land in China during the hottest months. Adding heat shock to the already overwhelming culture shock, jet lag, and generally stressful experience of relocation causes unnecessary suffering to all but a few reptile-blooded individuals. If you think this is a problem reserved for spoiled European and North American expats, think again. “Because of the heat, we hated the entire first six months,” Renata and Nicola recalled with visible shivers. “We thought, since we were from Brazil, a bit of heat could not scare us. But at home, the air cools in the evening. Shanghai suddenly surrounded us with a kind a feverish sensation from which there was no escape.” Foreigners who have made returns in different seasons can testify how easily such misery can be avoided. Architect Kristina Kinder described in her expat memoire how she plotted a more enjoyable second arrival in China than her first. “But this time, I decided that I won’t hate it. This time it will be different. It’s April. Shanghai is warm, sunny and friendly, but not too hot yet.”¹

Will ship-shape containers, seamless flights at temperate seasons, pleasant rides, flats, and offices guarantee that new arrivals are thoroughly prepared for starting anew in China? Based on the thousands of personal stories I heard, not at all. Regardless of the time, place, smoothness, or absurdity of their arrival, most expats agreed that preparing newbies for the magnitude, speed, and oddity of China is a fool’s errand. Like its iconic symbol, the Great Wall, the country will make new arrivals gaze in speechless awe even after seeing it in books, documentaries, and hearing personal accounts. While times, circumstances, and people change with every single visit, certain features of arriving in China seem to persist across the centuries. Since early Western visitors like Marco Polo, countless foreigners experienced the daunting realization that somehow, this place intended to invite, impress, and intimidate outsiders at the same time. Today as when the Polos arrived, the country’s engineering wonders play a crucial role in perpetuating that impression.

Seasoned expats recall their goose-bumpy airport rides past multilevel intersections and futuristic cityscapes. Henrik König of ThyssenKrupp boyishly pressed his nose to the car window at the sight of 2006 Shanghai. “The chauffeur picked me up at the terminal and sped me down perfectly built eight-lane highways. Everything was impeccable, even the hedges that separated traffic directions. I saw more luxury cars during that ride than at home in a year. It was incomparable to anything in Germany.” As he approached the center, Henrik gradually noticed tricycles overloaded with construction material, scrap metal, and wastepaper, as rare in his homeland as the honking supercars behind them. Many expats describe the surreal sight of avenues, streets, and alleys teeming with strange scenes, as if people had been choreographed to act excessively Chinese. “On my first evening, I took a walk near my apartment,” an Italian executive I coached recalled his arrival in Chongqing city. “In a park between thirty-floor residential towers, among trees lit by colourful spotlights, hundreds of old people ballroom danced to melodies blasting from a portable amplifier. The whole area was swirling and reverberating. I felt like I was drugged.”

He was not, but the city was on steroids. In the 1990s, one of the government’s many mammoth projects had been the urbanization of a predominantly agrarian society. Its vision to increase the proportion of people registered as urban dwellers from around 30 percent to over half of the population by 2020 was realized ahead of schedule, and the process continues. But this neck-breaking rush for the cities disrupted normal life for tens of millions of people. Ancient villages were scattered into the wind, demolishing places of service, privacy, community, worship, and identity. Multigeneration family homes were commanded into sterile concrete apartment blocks. The population of Chongqing alone doubled from 10 to over 20 million within a few years. The highly photographic urban rituals witnessed by incredulous foreigners are attempts to recreate uprooted routines. Immigrants in their own cities, farmers, and laborers turn empty plots into vegetable gardens and marketplaces. Masters teach martial arts and ballroom dancing in parks and parking lots. Fortune tellers, acupressurists, barbers, and ear-cleaners serve their clients on pavements, under bridges, or wherever they can.

Detours Into Chinese Reality

Generations of expats have recalled taking the wrong turn into a time traveler’s alley where a single block away from glitzy office towers, school-children scribbled homework at peeling desks, seemingly undisturbed by the nearby fishmongers, open-air barbers, and cheered-on card games. Such detours are reminders of the price Chinese people pay for their nation’s economic long march but also of their determination to carry on toward a better future. One statistic quoted ad nauseam is that China lifted over 750 million people out of poverty in recent decades.² That, however, also implies that at the beginning of the reform period, half a century into the Communist Party’s rule, three-quarters of the nation’s near-billion inhabitants were poor. Suddenly relieved by the permission to ditch the Maoist ideal of equality in poverty, a traditionally enterprising population applied a combustive cocktail of state socialism and market capitalism to pick up the pace of modern times. They did, but speed is a costly and wasteful commodity. The Communist Party’s once cherished goals of social equality, common prosperity, or at least the lack of resented elites soon fell victim to economic revival. Three decades of reform raised inequality from the level of the United Kingdom in 1990 to that of India, one of the highest in the world, by 2010.³

The streets that newly arrived foreigners walk during their first weeks in China are part of a gargantuan social experiment with uncertain outcomes, where locals and foreigners are equally at odds with ever-changing routines and realities. People, families, businesses, and communities concoct daily practices from ancient traditions, the legacy of semicolonial exposure at treaty ports, the revolutionary rituals imposed by the Communist Party, and recent ideals of middle-class prosperity. Most cities designated for Special Economic Zones (SEZs) have rich histories as foreign enclaves and deliberately follow routines imported from Europe, the United States, Japan, Russia, and beyond. The exotic rituals that result from this fusion create a pleasurable backdrop to a foreigner’s initial experience in China. “If you walk around in the morning, before the shops and malls and restaurants open, you can see how all the employees line up in front of their shop,” Kristina Kinder wrote. “They wear uniforms and get shouted at. In a chorus they shout back and then do gymnastics together. For me it is rather bizarre to see how obedient employees here are. I can’t imagine doing this myself.”

The good, the bad, the amazing, and the frightening in the China in One Word game are reflections of Beijing’s determination to manually balance an enormous national boat’s shifting cargo and agitated people as officials redraft and repopulate entire cities. Most prospective expats have a general awareness that China is a challenging destination due to its ancient culture, long isolation, and recent upheaval. While that is true, they soon find out that they, like generations of foreigners before them, are spared most of the strife and randomness that characterize life for the local population. Being an expatriate with a large company is an unusually smooth way to experience an otherwise mystifying travel destination like China. Nobody expects incoming foreign employees to be able to speak Chinese, find their hosting city on the map, or know how banks work. They are high-maintenance but potentially lucrative corporate human resources (HR). Airport pickups, preassigned accommodation, shipped-in belongings, welcome committees of local colleagues, agents, and housekeepers are ways to ensure a smooth ride to the expat’s first day in office. If all goes well, managers promptly get to work, kids go to school, and picture frames find their places on shelves. The faster that happens, the better the return on the firm’s investment.

Smooth collaboration between the Chinese authorities of SEZs and the multinational investors who populate them enable expats to spend weeks, months, or even entire multiyear assignments protected from surrounding complexities. At times, the subjective expat perspective can be adorably simplistic. When the China Flexpat Podcast asked a German Operations Manager about the complexities of changing jobs in China, he said it was very simple. “You just give your passport to the Human Resources Manager and take a few photos.”⁴ Local colleagues who conjure such miracles stay hidden from many expats, who only realize the value of their protected existence when they venture outside. When they first arrived, the accommodation and office for Renata and Nicola were both in the Intercontinental Building. Their lived and worked within that sheltered space until they decided to explore the city. “One day we entered a restaurant and I asked for a small salad,” Renata recalled. “The waiter said they only had large salads. We questioned how that was possible, but ordered one anyway. Later, they came back and told us they didn’t have one of the ingredients. Okay, give us chicken wings then. In forty minutes, they served the salad and the chicken wings. I started crying: I couldn’t even order my food in an international restaurant!”

The main attraction of China for foreigners is the prospect of a great career, and most expats know where their priorities lie. They may photograph army-style hairdresser drills, try their basic Mandarin skills with souvenir vendors and fishmongers, take daytrips, and tell their stories to incredulous families on Skype, but mostly they remain within confined foreigner-friendly spaces. They prepare toast and cereals over international cable news just in time for the children’s school bus and the company chauffeur. They pick up Starbucks before their first meeting, which typically happens in English. Spouses shop for familiar brands and take yoga classes with English-speaking trainers and patrons. Somewhere beyond the well-lit offices, schools, cafés, and gyms lie the mystifying alleyways of a real China often mentioned by long-serving expats. But foreigners were never supposed to live there. For centuries, the Middle Kingdom preferred visitors rather than residents however long they stayed, and offered them guided tours through manicured showcases rather than full immersion. To understand the status and role of expats in today’s China, we must briefly revisit the country’s traditional relations with emissaries of the outside world.

Expat Islands in the Real China

Shortly after my 2002 arrival in China, a charmingly fragile old lady approached me beneath a Shanghai supermarket’s towering stacks of instant noodles and dried shrimp. “Zdravstvujtye, menya zavut Masha” (Hello, my name is Masha), she greeted me in cheerful Russian, a language I owed to my schooling under the late Hungarian Socialist Workers Party. We managed a brief chat, but after a few pleasantries, she walked away. Apparently, I paled in comparison with the handsome foreigner whose image I conjured up in her memory. Had she been half a century younger, Masha would have used English and called herself Mandy. Everything had changed around her in a few short decades, and she was not alone with her nostalgia. To early 2000s arrivals like myself, China appeared to have started anew less than a decade ago, seemingly from zero. By the time I met Masha, the ice-breaking expat generation of the 1990s already resented the disappearance of the cheerfully grease-smudged, beautifully vapor-clad noodle-soup kitchens more akin to American Chinatowns than today’s Beijing or Shanghai. Some had moved to more authentic pastures in South-East Asia. New arrivals had moved into their jobs and homes, bringing their own hopes, fears, plans, and prejudices.

The foreigners who had returned to the Soviet Union, Eastern Europe, Cuba, and other fellow Leninist states before the sudden wave of globalization perpetuated a pattern as old as the Middle Kingdom itself. The land we now know as China was never the hermit kingdom of Western imagination. It had maintained millennia of extensive trade and diplomacy with northern nomads, empires beyond the Himalayas, realms along the trade routes we now call the Silk Road, and peoples accessible by sea from Malaya to Madagascar. But perhaps to avoid overexposure, successive ruling dynasties habitually tightened alliances in one direction while maintaining defensive caution in the other. As if following invisible north-south traffic lights, the early Qin and Han dynasties, known to the West mainly for the terracotta army in Xi’An, were preoccupied with northern neighbors. The Tang and Song dynasties a millennium ago represented China’s technological and cultural apex, but their empires were gradually pushed southward by increasingly uncontrollable northern nomads. We should forgive 13th-century Venetian merchant Marco Polo for thinking Cathay was an undiscovered kingdom. The Song capital had just been raised to the ground as the Great Kublai Khan integrated former Chinese territories into his Mongolian empire.

The West forgot and rediscovered China in recurring cycles. Two hundred years after the Polos, 15th-century admiral Zheng He reached the Red Sea as the ambassador of a lost continent. His stranded settlers blended into local tribes after a Ming emperor banned seafaring. Sixteenth-century European Jesuits followed the abandoned sea routes to baptize the Ming ruler and turn China into God’s model kingdom. The Mandarins, the court’s Confucian elite, welcomed crash-courses in astronomy, clockworks, and cannon smelting but dismissed the Gospels. “If practical Western learning and technology were originally meant to be the spoonful of sugar disguising the bitter medicine of Christianity, Ricci’s patients proved adept at guzzling the former and spitting out the latter,” historian Julia Lovell wrote.⁵ When 18th-century British merchants gained a foothold in Canton, China was still in a state of self-inflicted isolation. “We have never valued ingenious articles, nor do we have the slightest need of your country’s manufactures,” Emperor Qian-long declared to diplomat George Macartney.⁶ He was a Manchu, a descendant of Northern invaders who enforced strict segregation from indigenous Han people through language, law, and practices like half-shaven heads for men and foot-binding for women. Some of the cannons aimed at Macartney’s ships had been made centuries earlier by resident German Jesuit monks.⁷

The trading operations that the British East India Company and its successors developed after Western ambassadors like Macartney were the predecessors of today’s multinational corporations. The documented atrocities of the infamous Opium Wars rightly appall today’s readers, but in an era of much deadlier conflicts, they seemed like skirmishes. The Taiping Rebellion, China’s contemporary civil war, claimed over 10 million lives, 100-fold the combined death toll of the two Opium Wars. The territorial concessions that resulted from the First Opium War ending with the 1842 Nanking Treaty were meagre anyway. Nineteenth-century foreign communities in China were small and hardly livable. Foreigners were confined to an area near Canton that could hardly host a holiday resort today. To comply with official restrictions on foreign women entering China, gentlemen left their families at home or settled them in Portuguese-held Macau. Keeping the men company were scant local servants, merchants, and rowdy crews from ships calling at the Canton port. The treaty ports forced open by the 1856–1860 Second Opium War were similarly underwhelming. “In 1870 there were 1,666 foreign residents in the Settlement at Shanghai, men outnumbering women six to one, and there were 167 children,” Robert Bickers wrote in The Scramble for China.⁸

Imperial prohibitions ensured physical and mental segregation between locals and foreigners, including criminal punishment for teaching non-natives Chinese. Other aspects of interaction, like moving in and out of concession ports and intimate relations between locals and foreigners, were kept in check by laws and traditions on both sides. But the promise of wealth and power from trade outweighed the influence of the imperial court: Mandarins and local middlemen known to Westerners as Compradors diligently colluded with foreigners to dodge restrictions. That deprived the Court of both influence and income, while foreign trading houses and their local allies gained both. When Canton’s wealthiest Comprador known as Howqua died in 1843, his fortune exceeded the national treasury: he was probably the richest man on Earth.⁹ The conspiracy turned concession ports into hubs of not only commerce but also technology, science, and culture in a fading empire. China’s future was soon forged not at the Forbidden City but at the Hongkong Shanghai Banking Corporation (HSBC), Russell & Company, and the customs, postal, investment, and scientific institutions newly established by the Brits, Dutch, French, Americans, later Germans, Japanese, Russians, and others.

The Qing ruling house, China’s last imperial dynasty, finally collapsed in 1911. The new Republic’s mostly foreign-educated reformers once again looked beyond the southern seas for inspiration. From Beijing, the northern capital, government relocated to Nanjing, the southern capital, and invited advisors from Japan, the United States, and Germany. Siemens, Standard Oil, Pfizer, BASF, and scores of brands from the previously unwelcome West soon became household names in China’s cities, for their reliable products as well as investment and job opportunities. The next decade became China’s own Roaring Twenties with lamp oil, animal feed, and cigarette salesmen hassling the nation by day and spending their earnings in tea houses and cabarets at night. The decade did not last long. The Second World War started early in China, with gradual Japanese occupation during the 1930s. The ensuing civil war between Republican and Communist forces sent foreigners packing, and despite their best hopes, most never returned. Mao Zedong, the Leninist leader of the new People’s Republic of China (PRC) from 1949, admired Qin Shi Huang, builder of mines, iron smelts, roads, and emperor to the northern Qin dynasty. The tide turned northward again.

The Soviet Union proved a more willing sponsor to the new People’s Republic than the United States or its Western allies, and China borrowed political and industrial blueprints from the USSR and worldwide Communist nations. Chinese leaders were educated in Moscow, Sofia, and Pyongyang. With the Internationale and “Proletarians of the world, unite!” on their lips, scientists, engineers, laborers, and soldiers arrived to reconstruct the Socialist sibling. But their numbers paled in comparison with China’s previous exposure, especially after Stalin’s 1953 death soured Soviet-Chinese friendship and resulted in another wave of foreign departures. “In 1964, the total number of resident Russians, formerly the largest of the foreign communities, was down to 1,326, most of them living in Xinjiang,” Robert Bickers wrote. “There were 2,730 foreign nationals in Shanghai at the start of 1965, but 2,092 of these were African, Asian or Latin American students. There were only sixty-five others resident in the city who were not diplomatic staff. There were forty-two Britons in 1962 (most of them the elderly ethnically Chinese widows of British men), and five French nationals.” The number of Europeans in Shanghai doubled, the account adds, when 30 foreign experts arrived to teach at the Shanghai Foreign Language Institute.¹⁰

Footholds and Bridgeheads

In a decade, a new current of accommodation reached China again. At his 1972 visit, President Richard Nixon assured an incapacitated Mao Zedong and his French-educated diplomatic adviser Zhou Enlai that America and its friends in Hong Kong, Taiwan, Japan, South Korea, and Singapore would help rescue a nose-diving state-planned economy. In a few years, Mao and Zhou were dead, the Soviets had left, and others arrived. In 1992, a nearly 90-year-old man with Masha’s physique embarked on a well-publicized Southern Tour and institutionalized the country’s latest economic about-face. The man was Party patriarch Deng Xiaoping, who had spent some of his formative years with Zhou in Paris, working among others at Peugeot and Schneider factories. His destination was the resuscitated Shenzhen, China’s newly designated portal to the world. Nearby British colony Hong Kong acted as buffer, depot, and clearing house. Like once Marco Polo, foreigners who visited China in the new era of reform and reopening’ thought that the country had long been closed to the world. When China turns, reversals tend to erase most traces of previous periods, including people, products, practices, and memories.

China’s north-south cycles change according to the outcome of painstaking internal and international negotiations and reflect a determination to engage the outside world at the Middle Kingdom’s own terms. The concept continues to surprise outsiders, even though many believe that its physical manifestation, the Great Wall, is visible from spaceships. Conditionality has always applied to foreigners in China’s territory. Whether they were Persian caravans or princes from Ceylon, Dzungarian emissaries, or British bankers, their polite welcome took place at demarcated cantonments under close supervision. Silk Road trading stations had been as secluded from local life as Canton’s infamous factory encampment or Beijing’s Legation Quarters. Mao’s guests from sister nations were so strictly isolated that most of them were unaware of other foreigners in the same city.¹¹ As Deng put it, open windows let in fresh air but also flies. Today’s expat hubs represent the same tradeoff between ideological purity and the inflow of foreign funds. “Both before and after 1949 China’s reception and treatment of diversity has not been predicated on ideas of shared rights,” strategic think tank MERICS wrote in a 2019. “The aim was not to incorporate foreigners and other non-Chinese, but to insulate Chinese society from them.”¹²

Depending on their taste, temperament, goals, and expectations, some foreigners are happier with their enclosures than others. Amateur orientalists with Confucian leadership manuals under their pillow may be disappointed to give up the tea-sipping, calligraphy-scribbling, kung fu-fighting kingdom of their daydreams for English-language curiosity courses in shopping malls. Fans in search of Red China can still find fading revolutionary murals in condemned alleys where senior citizens shuffle mah-jongg tiles, but not for long. Some yearn for a more authentic experience and follow Beijing’s recurring go-west campaigns to Chengdu or Kunming. Many eventually return to Beijing, Shanghai, and Shenzhen. Demographic data suggest that for most foreigners, the system served its purpose. According to the 2010 census results that constituted the only reliable data source for a decade, over half of the country’s 600,000 foreigners lived in Beijing, Shanghai, and Guangzhou, and very few away from south-eastern shores.¹³ The 2020 census showed similar shares of the 850,000 foreigners living in the three top cities.¹⁴ For most expats who have ever lived in the country, the conveniences and challenges of a handful of cities equal life in China.

Foreigners sometimes feel suffocated by China’s expat hubs for a variety of reasons. Renata and Nicola became ever happier as they worked their way out of their corporate cocoon and befriended local middle-class families. Markus Baumgartner of Miba Group somewhat resented progressing in the other direction as he accumulated years of experience in China. “Even though we live in Suzhou, which is a golden cage for expats,” he explained to me, “we are very integrated in local life. We do not even live in a compound for foreigners. I don’t want to spend my weekend complaining how warm my sparkling water is.” Such scorn for China’s foreigner hubs is understandable from seasoned expats with countrywide experience and networks, and perhaps proficiency in Mandarin. Their sentiment also intrigues newcomers, who cannot wait to experience the real China. But the nation’s expat hubs have persisted for centuries for good reasons, shrinking and expanding with the ebb and flow of foreigners in the country. Without them, China would be a much less hospitable place for long-term immigrants, business travelers, and even tourists.

One reliable indicator of a nation’s openness to the world is the percentage of non-natives among its population. That the Vatican tops the list with all its citizens born abroad is an abundant source of jokes among researchers, but the rest of the list reveals profound comparisons. At some popular expat destinations, a third or more of the population is foreign-born, including, Australia, New Zealand, Singapore, Switzerland, and the United Arab Emirates. About a fifth to tenth of people in the major economies of North America and Europe are immigrants, and the ranking continues down to the relatively unexposed lower single-digit range. Although the United Nations (UN) survey in question generously rounded up the number of foreigners to a million, China still featured at the bottom of the list with Myanmar, Cuba, and Vietnam.¹⁵ “This amounts to 0.07 percent of the population, the smallest share of migrants of any country in the world,” a 2019 INSEAD publication warned. “New York City has more than thrice as many foreign-born residents.”¹⁶ For expats and their employers, these ratios are significant for several reasons.

Foreigners in culturally challenging countries enjoy living close to one another to absorb the culture shock and access services that locals do not use. “Foreign residents generate specific demands for education, housing and health care and are setting new patterns in entertainment, life-style trends and popular culture,” the MERICS study continues. If foreigners in China were as scattered across its territory as they are in the United States or Australia, accessing nonindigenous groceries, foreign-language schools, agencies, and entertainment would be nearly impossible, not to mention finding friends without fluency in Mandarin. Moreover, multinational firms also rely on expat populations as consumers and employees: Coca-Cola, Volkswagen, Lufthansa, or Google crowd-surfed to success in China, thanks to foreign firms and residents. Without expat clubs and societies, China’s cities would be unwelcoming for most foreign spouses and kids. In statistical terms, even top-tier cities fall short of cosmopolitan standards. If we can believe official data published in 2017, around 1 percent of Shanghai’s population was foreign-born, a ratio on par with the UN figures for Albania, Pakistan, and Ethiopia.¹⁷

Storefronts on Foreigner Street

It is hard to believe that statistically speaking, China has hardly any foreigners at all. Over years of keynote speaking, it became my guilty pleasure to quote statistics on the number and concentration of foreigners in China, then scan the audience for the inevitable the body language of surprise and disbelief. Their reactions are understandable, especially if they spent the previous Sunday queueing for a popular Italian restaurant among other expats in one of the nation’s expat hubs. The explanation, of course, is a combination of deliberate regulation and the fickle human desire to seek out like-minded people. Most expats not only live in a handful of cities but mostly populate a few preferred districts within, and several Chinese cities have entertainment areas called laowaijie, or foreigner street. A casual stroll in such an area on a sunny weekend feels as if you took the wrong turn and ended up in downtown Boston or Singapore. That impression is a good start to understanding how China’s expat enclaves work. The main function of the foreign-branded supermarkets, cafes and restaurants, retail stores, and banks is exactly to defy the national mainstream and act as cultural shock absorbers to the foreign visitors and immigrants who invest, enterprise, labor, and spend in China.

Expat surveys rank Mainland China high on work-related prospects and much lower on other dimensions of life quality, but that does not reflect truthfully on the nation’s overall values. Those who have had the privilege to roam far and wide in the country know how serene and patient Chinese people can be. Those rankings do, however, accurately describe the spirit of urban middle-class China, especially in the largest cities. For foreigners and locals alike, highly concentrated population centers increase the efficiency of daily work: they shorten commutes, concentrate material, natural and human resources, fasten communication, decisions, and action, and promptly turn the output of one business into the input of another. For visitors from China’s small towns, those cities are just as mad as their foreigners. In a country whose population traditionally valued familial ties, tranquility, and spirituality above all else, SEZs were created to enable the frantic activity needed for financial recovery. To say that SEZs have rules of their own is more than simple figure of speech: the zones do in fact operate as municipalities with the right to draft their own legislation.¹⁸

The very concept of specially designated economic zones was adopted from abroad to boost China’s development at the beginning of the Reform and Opening period. The first SEZs, defined as “geographical areas that allow the integration of free-market principles to attract additional foreign investment,” were established around 1980 in the vicinity of Guangzhou and Xiamen, two former concessions.¹⁹ How history repeated itself was not lost on observers. “It would have been more accurate to describe them as experiments in reverse-engineering the much reviled system of treaty ports,” Orville Schell and John Delury write in their book on China’s modernization. “This time around, however, Deng hoped to make a growing foreign presence in coastal trade enhance China’s wealth and power without undermining its sovereignty.”²⁰ In doing so, Beijing relied on successful examples of similar zones established from the 1960s onward in Taiwan, Singapore, South Korea, India, the Philippines and, around the same time with China, the United Arab Emirates.²¹

Each nation’s experiment with SEZs aimed at constructing a sort of landing strip for global capital in an otherwise restrictive system. Limitations could be economic, political, ideological, or all of these at the same time: authoritarian governments in Taiwan, Korea, and the Philippines, zealous prohibitions in Singapore, corruption in India, Sharia law in the Emirates, and so forth. As for China, allegedly the oldest continuous tradition in the world, it has puzzled foreigners for millennia with a certain sense of pride over rules and traditions that foreigners would never understand. Simplifying them for outsiders was never a priority: in fact, China worked long and hard to be misunderstood. It lacked diplomats, forbade its subjects to travel and to teach foreigners Chinese until the late 19th century. It rid itself of foreigners and most noneconomic cooperation until the 1990s. Combined with an imported Marxist–Leninist political blueprint and its local mutations, early-2000s China was a hopeless maze for foreigners without extensive local experience, which very few people had. SEZs shielded new arrivals from the confusion beyond. Within their confines, multinational firms, foreign-invested enterprises, and carefully handpicked local businesses happily interbred with one another as suppliers, clients and service providers.

“The SEZs were deliberately located far from the center of political power in Beijing, minimizing potential risks should any problems or political effects be generated during their functioning,” the authors of one study wrote. “More specifically, the original four zones were sited in coastal areas of Guangdong and Fujian that had a long history of contact with the outside world through out-migration, and at the same time were near Hong Kong, Macao, and Taiwan.”²² In these oases of otherness, executives could live and work without Chinese language skills or even vague ideas about the PRC’s legal and political system. Foreign entrepreneurs incorporated, financed, populated, and promoted companies through intermediaries, keeping a convenient distance from confusing local authorities. Legislation ensured strict separation between local and foreign-incorporated entities. An ecosystem of expat-friendly recruiting agencies, law firms, banks, freight-forwarders, consultancies, chambers, and networking clubs took care of business. International kindergartens, schools, clinics, up-market grocery stores, laundries, bakeries, and entertainment settled everything else, and encouraged a segregated life between the international and local populations. In compliance with local law, many religious congregations and membership organizations in expat hubs still exclude PRC passport holders.

Protection and privilege often come at the cost of frustrating confinement. From early concession ports to mushrooming foreign settlements, then SEZs, and the expat communities they spawned, many foreigners lamented their transitory nature, characteristic obsession with work over everything else, and their ignorance of the nation that surrounded them. Some admitted that expats were free to chase plentiful opportunities within the zones, but protested that Chinese jobs, firms, and careers seemed to elude them outside the specially designated areas. Such complaints became louder as some indigenous firms like Huawei, Alibaba, and Tencent bloomed into highly visible success stories. “For the most part, for foreigners looking to get a foot in the door, it remains particularly difficult to secure a job with a 100% Chinese-owned firm,” the BBC wrote in 2014. “There are more job opportunities available with foreign companies operating in the country. Around 85% of expats work for these international firms, with the largest proportion in sales and marketing, followed by banking and financial services and engineering.”²³

Such intermittent complaints stand in sharp contrast with countless satisfied patrons of SEZs on all sides: expats, authorities, and local employees, customers, suppliers, and more. The regime has been a pivotal part of China’s unprecedented economic success story often labeled a miracle. “It was estimated that in recent years, SEZs at national level accounted for about 22% of national GDP, 46% of foreign investment and 60% of exports and generated in excess of 30 million jobs,” a 2015 World Bank study reported. “In some regions, industrial parks account for anywhere between 50% to 80-90% of growth in GDP. Up to date, China’s overall technology commercialization rate is only about 10%, while industrial parks in China on average boast a commercialization rate of over 60%.”²⁴ Even the briefest visits to a handful of towns and companies in China reveals the obvious advantage of SEZs over the country in general in terms of infrastructure, public and private services, and even the fashion choices and leisure activities of local inhabitants. In small towns, locals still ridicule foreign joggers for their hilarious habit. In Tianjin or Shenzhen, they scrutinize the runner’s equipment.

It Is a Family Business

Beyond business, the most helpful feature of China’s expat hubs is that newcomers are immediately surrounded by more experienced foreign families who crave to share their wisdom. “The expat network is incredibly helpful once you get access to it,” Briana recalled. “Even before I relocated, I met someone who had just returned from Shanghai. He connected me to his driver, who picked me up from the airport. Another colleague told me about being an expat in Shanghai and what I should do differently there.” Even in top-tier cities, novices might need help with the simplest things. “On my second day in China, I created complete chaos in a Blue Frog restaurant because I confused the two local waiters,” Attila Hilbert of Danone said. “I am still grateful for the French couple who intervened.” Shaken by their similar misadventures, Nicola thought hard about his prospects as a dependent spouse without English or Chinese skills. Fellow foreigners suggested courses in both languages, which utterly changed his experience of Shanghai. Lucky breaks can come from unexpected sources: one expat manager described how he got a job offer while watching the football World Cup with fellow Germans at one of those foreigner-street bars.²⁵

Speaking of bars: singles, especially single men, are overrepresented all over the expat universe including China. “Female assignees represent only 20% of the international assignee population, although with a steady upward trend compared to 14% in 2017 and 11% in 2015,” relocation firm Mercer wrote.²⁶ Reasons are multiple, including the predominance of men in management in general, and especially in sectors where a vast majority of multinational firms in China belong: machinery, automotive, technology, financial services, and so on. China’s reputation as a culturally challenging and fairly workaholic culture makes it more likely that employers prefer to send single men there. As far as I can tell from conversations with female candidates and expats, China’s public image as a male-dominated society, above all media appearances by its political leaders, probably perpetuates the imbalance. What such data imply, however, is subject to each prospective expat’s individual judgment.

Others arrive with dependents, and even solitary assignments may become family adventures over time. Either way, the success of the mission hinges on how each member weathers the transition and how successfully they support (or irritate) one another. When families relocate, self-reflection is required from everyone, Bronwyn Bowery-Ireland reckons. “The family must be aligned. Expat assignments are especially likely to fail when the spouse is not fully on board.” The lifestyles of expat families in new locations can be fundamentally different from previous routines. “If your partner doesn’t have a purpose, then after a while it will get difficult,” Hays’s Richard Eardley said. “If they are stuck in a condo making lunches, they will end up unhappy.” Managing a home for an overworked spouse in a foreign land is tough. Finding a job in an unknown city is hardly easier. Both can be challenging without the support of familiar communities in a place that uses an inaccessible language. Whether a spouse builds a nest or runs a quest, the choice must be voluntary.

It may take a few turbulent weeks for consenting adults to reach the necessary alignment, but the work is not done yet. Ignoring proper preparation and setting sail into the unknown can be liberating for the travelers but devastating for dependents such as children and elderly relatives. “You must look at it in a holistic way,” Richard Eardley continued. “Expat assignments that do not work for the whole family are bound to fail, so you must ask yourself some tough questions. I have a grown-up son who was just about to start university. Wondering whether I would be okay being away from him was probably the hardest part of my decision to leave.” It took him weeks of contemplation and hours of conversation to make up his mind. For people who decide to start a new life abroad, that time is well invested. Today’s corporate adventurers do not run the 50 percent risk of being massacred by pirates or succumbing to swamp fever, but the person or family that returns will not be the same one that high-fived the news of an overseas assignment. Managing the inevitable changes is one secret to fulfilling expat careers. At least the manageable ones, that is, because however well a foreign family prepares for their sojourn in China, there will always be life-changing circumstances beyond their control.

The comfort and convenience of well-serviced, English-speaking surroundings can help expats across countless daily hurdles, but critical life experiences would be nearly unimaginable without them. About half of the foreign families featured in this book delivered babies or raised children in China. The tone of their recollections was almost always positive, for which the country’s insular expat economy can take some of the credit. “I knew from a friend’s experience that delivering a baby in a local hospital can be tough for foreigners,” Fernanda Barth, HR Manager for a Brazilian industrial firm WEG, told me when I visited her in Nantong, a south-eastern port city. By the time of our 2019 interview, I had trained WEG China managers in leadership skills for five years, while she and her husband had worked for the firm in Nantong for a decade. “Most Chinese hospitals are crowded and their medical staff are overworked, so they cannot treat patients gently: they just want to get on with their jobs. My friend could not find an English-speaking doctor there, so she brought along a work colleague to translate, which created a very awkward atmosphere for everyone. I delivered my daughter in a top international hospital, and it was a dramatically positive experience.”

As kids grow and expat families start considering their education, choices vary from international to local schools, and various combinations of the two. Predictably, Markus Baumgartner opted for early education in Mandarin for his son. “We were extremely anxious to send him to a Chinese kindergarten because he only spoke German. On the first day, we heard him repeat ‘ting bu dong’ (I don’t understand), the only thing he knew in Chinese. But then, he started playing toy cars with other children and they found a common ground. In half a year he picked up enough Chinese.” When children grow out of kindergarten, however, choices get harder for many expat families. Local and international education is strictly segregated in the People’s Republic: beyond primary level, students who started their education in one system find it nearly impossible to transition to the other. Therefore, foreign families must think a decade ahead, taking into consideration their children’s interest, cost, and possible relocation down the road. The pressure is especially high as tuition fees at most international schools target well-paid top executives and entrepreneurs at a time when many multinationals cut their expat budgets.

“When she finishes kindergarten, I would like my daughter to study at the only international school in Nantong,” Fernanda Barth continued. “The problem is the price. The Chinese kindergarten costs around eighteen thousand Chinese yuan a year. The international school would cost a hundred and fifty thousand a year, only part of which can be paid by the company.” For most foreign families, facing the edges of expat existence and gradually being exposed to the real China creates much anxiety. “I know we are spoiled with the insurance packages we get here,” Chris from the European luxury fashion firm admitted. “But we had to take my daughter to check-ups at local children’s hospitals, and after the queueing and language confusion, we were glad to return to private clinics.” Many expats admitted having equally overwhelmed health care and education systems in their home countries, but that seemed to be beside the point. Certain standards of physical and emotional comfort were simply part of the package. To guarantee that was the firm’s business, just as running the business was the expat’s concern. And companies do their best to take care of everything. Everything, at least, that is within their control.

The Air Is Everywhere

The best things in life are supposed to be free. Or perhaps it is the other way around. Perhaps we draw so much comfort, joy, and inspiration from the plants, animals, heavenly bodies, and even the air around us because they are always there without asking anything in return. But relocation to exotic places can shake life to its very basics, and China is among the best examples for that. In contrast with its stellar career opportunities, curious culture, and the lasting advantages of having worn the Dragon Suit, expat life in China also comes with considerable annoyances. Before the COVID-19 pandemic, topping the reasons why many talented foreigners either refused to relocate to China or prematurely terminated their assignments there were polluted air and restricted Internet connectivity. For over a decade, surveys by the American, European Union, German, Benelux, and other Chambers of Commerce consistently found these two irritations to interfere with the talent pool of foreign firms in China, and anecdotal evidence from my interviews supports their findings. It seems that the otherwise freely available joys of life like a refreshing walk in nature or the soothing voice of a friend can easily become hard-earned luxuries for expats in China.

“Living here does have its drawbacks,” warns an HSBC country guide. “Air pollution is particularly bad—so you’ll probably spend a lot of time indoors.”²⁷ On the one hand, China was always infamous for its unhealthy air among most expats, even those who never went there. On the other, few newcomers realized the full extent of the problem before they directly experienced it. That is not a coincidence. A 2014 study reported Beijing’s air pollution level since 2008 about six times the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s limit but also a consistent reluctance from Chinese authorities to report the problem.²⁸ “For us, Shanghai was a city without outdoors,” Chris, the luxury fashion CFO, told me years after he had moved his family to Hong Kong. Beyond obvious health hazards, the annoyances of confining work and play, evenings and weekends inside, filtering the air and ventilating rooms in rotation gradually overwhelmed nerves too. Over time, something akin to cabin fever could undermine the morale of individuals as well as the life of entire families.

Newcomers quickly developed the habit of compulsively checking their mobile phone’s air quality apps. When they nervously consulted seasoned expats about readings that showed multiple times the recommended health limit, they often received a characteristically Chinese response: “You should have seen the pollution a few years ago!” Indeed, early 2000s expats were blissfully obvious of the fumes that they inhaled. China never published air quality data until the 2008 Beijing Olympic Games. That year, the U.S. Embassy in Beijing started sharing the readings of its rooftop monitor on Facebook and Twitter, then still accessible in China. State media hurriedly declared the initiative “not only confusing but also insulting.”²⁹ After amusing attempts to choke monitoring equipment and data sharing, the government yielded to public uproar and broadcast air quality data since 2012. Many, however, still misjudged the severity of the problem. “I was in a long-distance cycling group for expats,” Henrik König recalled. “I remember how upset I was when I received a text message that a fifty-kilometer bicycle tour had been cancelled because of an air quality index above 150. I often went for a run instead. It was not because I considered myself tougher than others—it simply was not an issue for me. I am not sure if that was stupid or lazy.”

It was neither. The main reason why people remained so blasé about what they inhaled was the general lack of awareness. By then, advanced economies had long introduced restrictive measures for bad-air days. By contrast, China seemed to go about its business regardless of pollution problems for several years after it had started monitoring the situation. During the 2013 Airmageddon, out of hundreds of major cities surveyed, only Haikou in China’s southernmost Hainan Island, Lhasa in faraway Tibet, and Zhoushan in Zhejiang province passed Beijing’s official air quality standards.³⁰ Flights were grounded and cars collided due to the all-engulfing purple haze, yet Chinese authorities contemplated and ultimately authorized fireworks for the upcoming Lunar New Year celebrations.³¹ “We tended to dismiss it,” luxury fashion CFO Chris said. “I remember how we played soccer on some of the most polluted days. It was so bad that we could hardly see each other in the purple clouds of smog. The air quality index was over 500 as opposed to the maximum 100 recommended for outdoor sports.”

Managers who gained insight into the workings of the problem also realized that it was a complex systemic issue rather than an unfortunate side-effect of development that would solve itself over time. “The Chinese government allows industry to freely pollute the air, water and ground, which (combined with the low cost of labor) easily allows industry to undercut the prices charged by companies abiding by strict standards elsewhere in the world,” the authors of an early 2000s study wrote. “However, the economic incentives offered to foreign capital to invest in China, including few controls over pollution and worker health and safety violations, have created an ecological nightmare.”³² Expats reacted accordingly. “I kept asking myself whether I was crazy to have brought my kids to this country,” Attila Hilbert said. “Then I reminded myself that in critical situations, one must research, plan and prepare without panicking. I checked the seals on all doors and windows—this remains my primary criterion for choosing a flat in China whether I otherwise like it or not. I started investing in equipment: I have spent about twelve thousand euros on internal and external air quality monitors, air purifiers, sealing material, and masks.”

Playing soccer with invisible friends and finding fearful refuge behind perfectly sealed doors and windows represent opposing attitudes to living with pollution. Both excesses can be harmful, although in different ways. “I had a colleague who was a passionate cycler,” Attila Hilbert told me. “He cycled like a maniac, covering the 180-kilometre distance from Shanghai to Hangzhou and back, sometimes several times a week. In a few years, he was taken to surgery with heart problems. I use his story as a cautionary tale for new expats. We are not talking about imminent death, but you have to take the problem seriously.” The vigorous outdoor exercise routine of his pedal-happy friend only accelerated otherwise common long-term health effects. The consequences of swinging the pendulum toward voluntary confinement may be less dramatic or China-specific but just as harmful. Spending entire weekends binge-watching TV shows and blaming Asian cuisine for the resulting extra pounds is comically stereotypical among China expats. Beyond obvious health effects, breathing contaminated air undermines cognitive performance as well. Microparticles like PM2.5 find their way into the bloodstream and cause harm wherever their chemical content is deposited, including the brain.³³

Managers in China must also monitor air quality for the sake of their businesses. Bad-air days disrupt outdoor photography and filming, promotional events, sports games, concerts, exhibitions, and fairs. Mindful customers stay away from open-air restaurants, cafes, and swimming pools. Pollutants necessitate additional precaution in transporting and storing meat, fruits and vegetables, impact businesses that grow or breed anything, deface buildings and works of art. Companies track pollution-related productivity losses such as additional sick-days and medical cost, including spouses and children. Damage to people and businesses adds up. According to some calculations, each extra percentage of pollution measurement costs China nearly 0.01 percent of annual GDP, approaching two billion U.S. dollars a year.³⁴ “Our health and safety regulations demand that we provide adequate filtering when the air quality index exceeds 200, I think, otherwise people can refuse to work,” the South China General Manager of a European electronics manufacturing firm told me during my visit. “If we complied, we would either lose several working weeks every year, or spend millions on equipment. Fortunately, Chinese workers care more about cash than cancer. This is our Band-Aid.” The butt of his joke was a portable air purifier, humming diligently near an open window.

Whether pollution amused or annoyed, foreigners in China during the smog-clad 2000s and 2010s depended on their circumstances. Parents of young children worried the most. “On days when you felt like you could chew the air,” said Shaun Rein of China Market Research, “even me, who loves China and does reasonably well financially here, thought about moving out of the country. We could not let my son play outdoor soccer—we signed him up for basketball instead. We would not let him walk or take a bike to school, instead we made him wear a face-mask and drove him to classes every day.” Those who never experienced vicious circles of confinement and frustration in cities where yards, gardens, and balconies are rare privileges cannot imagine how quickly family life turns into incessant quarrel. “Expatriates based there are starting to ask their employers to revert to 1980s and 1990s based hardship packages for pollution,” a Bloomberg article wrote in 2014. “Multinationals are having to work hard to retain them with some expats leaving their families at home and starting often strenuous monthly or bi-weekly commutes to see them.”³⁵

It is fair to assume, as employers and recruitment agencies typically did, that behind the documented departures of expats due to pollution, there were just as many people who refused postings to China due to the bad reputation of its air quality. Among those who stayed on, many admitted the problem but tried to see it in perspective, like Richard Eardley of Hays. “Sure, you must get used to living with poor air quality in China, but so is the case in many other, otherwise attractive expat destinations.” Fernanda Barth of WEG Nantong made a more specific comparison. “Sure, the air is much better in Brazil. But life there has many negative aspects we do not have in China, like worrying about crime in the streets. Overall, the positives far outweigh the problems for us.” Neither did pollution work identically on everyone. “Ironically, while Nicola suffered from breathing issues that got progressively worse with time, Shanghai’s air cured me of my chronic asthma,” Renata Santos told me, visibly amused.

In subsequent years, China both managed to improve its overall air quality and openly celebrated relative milestones like Beijing’s removal from a list of the world’s 200 most polluted cities.³⁶ Nevertheless, its air remains one of the world’s worst alongside India and a handful of countries in the former Soviet Union, Middle East, and North Africa. As of mid-2022, three of the 10 most polluted cities in the world, and nine out the top 50, were in the PRC.³⁷ Thus, while pollution has graduated from debilitating disaster to irritating inconvenience, it remains a central theme to China’s expat reality. “Today, expats are not going to get the blue skies they see in France and you won’t be able to hike as you can on the West Coast of the United States, but pollution is not the deal-breaker that it once was,” Shaun Rein said. “There is still a lack of natural beauty and the ability to go away for the weekend, like the Hamptons from New York City or the Alps from Paris. But this is also getting better with the high-speed train network: we are now able to reach locations that were inaccessible even just four years ago.”

China’s Intermittent Internet

Even before the recent COVID-19 pandemic, people all over the world found themselves grounded for various reasons: extreme heat or cold, sandstorms, wars, discrimination, crowds, crime, curfews, and pollution. When they did, they sought entertainment and encouragement online. But foreign families stuck with hazy top-floor views and whizzing air purifiers in the PRC had to contend with the added annoyance of restricted Internet connectivity since the mid-2000s. For predominantly political reasons, authorities block access to most global community sites and messaging apps, including Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram, Snapchat, WhatsApp, Viber, Signal, Reddit, Pinterest, and Flickr. Also unavailable are content-sharing tools like Dropbox, Tumblr, Picasa, Google Books, Docs, Drive, and Scholar, search engines like Yahoo and streaming (and parenting) platforms like YouTube, Netflix, Amazon, and Apple TV. Videoconferencing applications are selectively available: Skype and a few others freely, Zoom and Microsoft Teams with convoluted restriction protocols, some not at all. As consolation, expats in China become masters of the technology known as virtual private networks or VPNs.

“In China, there’s nothing more annoying than the Internet,” Whitney Shindelar, then Director of Operational Excellence for Starwood Hotels and Resorts, expressed a documented universal sentiment in a 2016 article.³⁸ Many expats initially approach Internet restrictions with cultural curiosity—testing limits, learning circumvention methods, and observing the collective psychology of digital isolation. “Cyberdetox really does improve your self-esteem,” quipped the author of a 2018 expat memoire. “My sudden introspection had a lot to do with the fact that when I first arrived in China (without a VPN), I was pretty much cut off. For the first time in four years I felt disconnected from the unbridled access of modernity.”³⁹ Recollections of such plunges into China’s digital darkness make excellent stories. My favorite is from a young expat researcher at a prestigious Hong Kong university, who took a short trip to Shenzhen just to test the network. “I wasn’t particularly interested in the place, but I wanted to see for myself if connectivity was really so bad, or it was just Western propaganda.” The experiment backfired: unable to contact him and seeing him vanish from all social media and tracking apps for days, his family reported him missing with the Hong Kong police.

Expats learn to live with, and sometimes even love exotic aspects of China, including the food, the climate, and curious rules of social interaction. But like pollution, shock and frustration over Internet restrictions do not abate over time and can even increase with each poorly connected hour, day, week, or in pandemic times, month or year. The saga starts with the disturbing realization that roughly half of the World Wide Web’s content goes blank in the PRC. It continues with gradually noticing some method in the madness of blockages. Unavailable content tends to contradict the legitimacy or narrative of the Communist Party or fall in the categories of foreign news and social media, unchecked user-generated matter, anything deemed vulgar, pornographic, obscene, violent, or in competition with state-favored domestic tech services, one specialist publication summarized.⁴⁰ Then comes the equally unnerving discovery that experimenting with the limits of China’s half-Internet may further worsen connectivity. “The most accurate test of censorship is conducted inside the censoring country, but doing so comes with a variety of risks,” one 2015 article warned. “Continual attempts to visit blocked sites are detectable by the local authorities, and can therefore be dangerous political activity.”⁴¹

A recurring theme among foreigners in China is the emotional trauma of isolation, helplessness, and sadness beyond the practical inconvenience. “It can be a lonely experience,” Fernanda expressed her reactions, “being cut off from a large part of what is happening at home.” Other disconnected expats fear for their business or children’s education. “China is Horrible for Digital Nomads,” reads the farewell rant of a five-year resident. “I’m sick and tired of just not being able to get on Instagram, or having to drain my 4G to load a Snap. Wouldn’t it be nice if the Internet just worked? I’ve almost forgotten what that’s like.”⁴² Shaun Rein called attention to the damage done to expat children’s education. “It is bothersome to lose access to Instagram, but the biggest issue for executives is the impact on education,” he said. “Without VPNs, children at international schools are unable to access one-third to half of the websites that the school wants them to use. Kids can’t get access to apps to improve typing skills, they can’t get access to math courses, and that is a deep frustration that makes a lot of expats who might like China get extremely critical, depressed and angry.”

VPNs can partially circumvent restrictions. “Initially, my children and I made active efforts to learn to live without the banned sites,” said Marie, senior HR management executive at a world-leading pharmaceutical multinational. “Then, I joined a group of expat parents for playing cards, and I was surprised how much they knew about what was trending on YouTube.” China’s vibrant internal digital ecosystem complies with government censorship but works mostly in Mandarin and has little to do with life outside the PRC. Without VPN applications, most expats would be isolated from both global and local online communities. “Expats in China worship Virtual Private Networks (VPNs) because they allow access to websites that we’d be able to see if we were anywhere else in the world,” one memoire explained. “As the VPN connection spikes up and down in bright blue and red, it mimics a heart monitor—except that it often falls flat for no particular reason. VPN access is even blocked when important political meetings are taking place in Beijing, or when China is in the global news, or whenever the hell the Chinese government wants to block it.”⁴³ Emilia Korczynska says it best in her memoire: “I don’t have stronger feelings for anyone on Earth than my VPN. I think I would marry it if it wasn’t so flaky.”⁴⁴

My interviews revealed similar tactical varieties toward pollution and Internet restrictions: some proudly prepared, some silently suffered, and a serene minority simply dismissed the problem. “Our intercultural trainer in Brazil taught us how to install a VPN before we entered the country, and how to use it,” said Nicola Santos. “But even with it, the Internet is unstable. We had to get used to constantly changing servers.” Once again, families with young children had a tougher time. “My son was already a teenager when we moved here, so he had done his research and seemed to be okay,” Attila Hilbert recalled. “But my daughter basically cried through the first three months. Before we had a VPN, she could not call any of her friends or our family. When we installed one, she had to learn which content not to search, because visiting banned sights slowed down our connection incredibly.” Finally, individual reactions also depend on how badly someone wants to stay connected while in China. “I grew up in a world without social media,” Chris, the luxury fashion CFO admitted. “When I arrived in China, even Facebook did not exist, not to mention WeChat. I lived without them before, and I can live without them now.”

For expat managers in China, social media troubles are just the beginning. Multinational corporations store, process, and share reports, inventories, employee profiles, balance sheets, and legal documents in global databases and cloud storages. Smart networks remotely operate buildings, factories, vehicles, equipment, warehouses, purchases, and teams. China’s deliberately selective data flow creates fractures and bottlenecks that burden data-intensive work with daily headaches. “The Internet is incredibly unreliable and slow,” wrote Kristina Kinder, an architect. “Sometimes it takes one hour to e-mail my portfolio, or the process stops in the middle and I have to start all over again. How spoiled we are at home!” Attila Hilbert coached many expats through the shock of losing access to essential applications like search engines, Google Maps, and databases. “Expats face an information shortage that is not only infinitely frustrating but can also be dangerous,” he said. “At home, these apps are part of normal life, and many expats feel imprisoned here when they realize their absence. The only solution is to know and accept what you cannot access in China.”

Acceptance often resembles the problem more than the solution. “The worst part was that our team kept losing time and data, but nobody knew exactly how,” said Marie. “There was no official guidance on the restrictions. There were even look-alike front pages to Google and other inaccessible sites. What frustrated us the most was the disruption of a data base called Taleo, where the Human Resources Department uploaded and processed resumés for the entire organization. When we compared the speed and ease of the process to other countries, we found that in China we lost a few seconds on every single transaction. When you work with large volumes of data, those extra seconds add up and cause measurable damage.” A 2019 EU Chamber China paper estimated that loss of document exchanges with headquarters, partners, and customers, office productivity, and essential research amount to 6 percent of the annual revenue of member firms.⁴⁵ “It’s a disturbing situation,” Fernanda Barth admitted. “Broadband connections appear fast in China, but somehow the data transfer is still slow. Without a VPN, it is virtually impossible to do research or even finish routine tasks. We are a Brazilian company, but lots of websites hosted in Brazil are blocked. To access those, managers must go home and use a VPN.”

China to the World, Unplugged

The so-called Great Firewall, a gargantuan information technology project that enables control over the Internet, is surprisingly little-known outside of China. Those who are aware of its existence often believe that it is the remnant of darker times before recent reforms. In reality, it is better understood as pushback against initial online enthusiasm that proved too much for Beijing’s taste. “When it formally arrived in 1994, it was relatively free and seen as an extension of the Open Door policy of tapping Western knowledge to reform the economy,” a 2018 Bloomberg article explained the Internet’s early spread in China. “From 2000, the foundations of the Great Firewall were laid with the introduction of the Golden Shield Project, a database-driven surveillance system capable of accessing every citizen’s record and connecting China’s security organizations.”⁴⁶ Restrictions steadily accelerated in the early 2010s with a new State Internet Information Office (SIIO), later renamed Cyberspace Administration of China (CAC) now headed directly by President Xi Jinping. A State Administration of Press, Publications, Radio, Film, and Television (SAPPRFT) was created to coordinate censorship across diverse media.

While it did benefit local technology firms, the PRC’s half-Internet is a fundamentally political project. In 2017, in preparation for the 19th National Congress of the Chinese Communist Party, new regulations required personal identification from owners of websites and URL addresses and allowed the close monitoring of chat messages. Scrutiny was later extended to unlikely forums such as the text chats of Mainland users in online video games.⁴⁷ “I think I know what they are trying to do,” Shaun Rein told me. “I generally believe in free speech and oppose censorship, but you have seen the disinformation that’s being spread about China in the Western world. There would be much more elegant solutions to this problem, but I understand the intentions.” Meanwhile, he admitted the futility of the methods used: according to surveys conducted by his firm China Market Research Group, nearly four-fifth of Chinese in their 20s used VPNs to surf the net in major cities. Not only that, he added. “Internet policies in China need a rethink also because Chinese people support their government, including those who can access foreign sites. The restrictions only make people frustrated.”

Beyond annoying locals and expats alike, restrictions face foreign firms with impossible choices. The legalities of China’s peculiar online ecosystem are blurred at best. “The first step in censorship is you can’t talk about the censorship,” CNN quoted Eric Liu of China Digital Times in 2021.⁴⁸ Most managers are unsure, for instance, whether their firms commit legal violations by unblocking restricted content with software downloaded abroad or through existing VPN connections. Granting access to Chinese employees is especially risky because the country’s labor and national security laws enable authorities to hold companies accountable for violations by employees. “As far as I know,” Fernanda said, “WEG does not install VPN solutions at least partly because they don’t want Chinese employees to have full access at work.” Many companies purchase circumvention software from the same state-owned Internet service providers that enforce the restrictions, but that option is expensive, partial, and allows the monitoring of user traffic.⁴⁹ Creative solutions abound. “Our communication goes through Hong Kong, so people can access most, but not all content. That includes our local colleagues,” Attila Hilbert explained Danone’s practice.

As universal connectivity became essential for business in most sectors, China’s reputation and attractiveness among talented expats suffered. Widely referenced surveys routinely ranked China last in Internet freedom, with laggards like Iran, Saudi Arabia, and Cuba receiving double its score.⁵⁰ Despite its global ambitions as a technological powerhouse, the PRC increasingly found itself in terrible company. When the Solomon Islands contemplated blocking foreign sites, Freedom House reminded it that “if the government goes ahead with its plan to totally ban Facebook, it would be joining just three other countries which currently do so: China, North Korea and Iran.” A 2021 censorship survey unceremoniously grouped the PRC together with North Korea.⁵¹ While China exports high-speed Internet equipment, its autonomous territories Taiwan and Hong Kong noticeably outpace the motherland in Internet freedom, speed, and competitiveness.⁵² Departing expats give vocal testimony to statistics. “I also won’t miss China’s slow and restricted access to the Internet,” serial entrepreneur Marc van der Chijs wrote in a CNN opinion piece. “When the government also started to block VPNs, I realized that the situation was not likely to improve anytime soon.”⁵³

As opposed to pollution, Internet restrictions keep showing worrying signs of deterioration. “The Chinese government asked Google’s services to take down 2,290 items in the first half of last year, according to the company’s statistics,” a 2018 article reported. “That was more than triple the number it requested in the second half of 2016, which itself had set a record.”⁵⁴ Foreigners nervously eye the digital horizon. Periodic news of a complete ban on VPN services add to their anxiety even when the rumors turn out to be incorrect. “There’s only one remaining way to get unfiltered access to the outside world in China–and Beijing just banned it,” announced one article entitled China Is Trying to Give the Internet a Death Blow.⁵⁵ “The whole situation is very symbolic of China’s relationship with the outside world,” explained Judith, a German industrial conglomerate’s Shanghai-based senior manager for renewable energy investments I coached in intercultural leadership. “It is neither entirely closed, nor fully open. At work we use the censored internet in compliance with local law, but if commercial VPNs disappeared, it would undermine our whole existence here. You could not get even the most basic things done.”

Tellingly, foreigners who ultimately moved away from China often rediscovered the blessings of Internet connectivity, including managers I coached after their relocations to South-East Asia, the Middle East, or Eastern Europe. “I then surprised myself after realizing how productive and seamless working remotely was these days,” one former PRC resident wrote in his 2020 blog post. “In Bali there’s (relatively) high-speed Internet access and, as a bonus, no need to leap over/through/around the Great Firewall of China with a VPN.”⁵⁶ From their foreign enclaves, the Dragon Suits who stay witness the country’s inner workings like neither locals nor outsiders could. They see it both for what it is and what it is becoming, often with sobering clarity. “Looking out of the window in our office in Lujiazui, you don’t see hedge fund managers and Wall Street types walk around here,” Shaun Rein told me in late 2019 as he pointed at Shanghai’s busy commercial district below. “China is a comfortable place for state-owned banks and a few commercial banks, but with restrictions that hurt businesses on a daily basis, they cannot compete with places like Singapore. It is a real frustration, and that’s why I think unless China rethinks its Internet policies, its cities cannot become financial centers.”

Bracing for Culture Shock

Clients often ask me how they can spot the best expat candidates for China’s frantic, crowded, and yet secluded environment. Bosses want to send their best people to China as advised by consultants, but best in which way? People tend to defy categories—foreigners in China, like any demographic group, show an amazing diversity of motives, choices, and lifestyles. Moreover, few managers who assign expats to China have the full picture necessary to make sufficiently clear decisions. HR specialists at headquarters typically know little about China, and those in China lack complete insight into the available candidate pool. Most success stories that came out of my interviews were trial and error at the beginning, then a serendipitous combination of persistent self-improvement and accidental opportunity. As the subjects themselves often admitted, they found themselves at the right place at the right time, then worked very hard to do the right thing. Meanwhile, decision makers are aware how much of the process is up to luck, especially as their firms bet increasing amounts of money on the China market.

As coach Bronwyn Bowery-Ireland observed, almost anyone can be reasonably productive almost anywhere, including China. Still, decision makers who pair expats with jobs try hard to understand what separates thriving expats from the ones who simply get by. Why is it that two managers with very similar resumés approach their expat assignments completely differently, with dramatically diverse results? The key to the riddle, I tell my clients, is the difference between constants and variables within the complex formula of relocating someone: what will change and what will stay the same after the dramatic move of settling in another continent. Most multinational firms consult the performance records of applicants under the assumption that people who did well in one country would also succeed in another. In fact, little will remain of that record after relocation. Performance largely depends on surroundings: why would someone remain equally productive after moving to a place where everything, from colleagues to the climate and the job itself, is unfamiliar? Meanwhile, decision makers devote too little attention to what remains the same regardless of location: the candidate’s character and personal history.

It seems that corporate hiring and promotion practices confuse the order of two essential elements of succeeding as an expat. They assume that if they successfully match a job with the right professional experience, the appointee’s life in the new location will form spontaneously around work. In fact, it is the other way around: only expats with a favorable chemistry toward their new surroundings can do a better than average job. In order to establish that chemistry in advance, HR managers must learn to push resumés to the side for a minute, and consider subtleties such as the temperament, personal background, and recent life experience of possible candidates. Will they have the flexibility to adapt to an entirely different pace, the tranquility to accept China’s cultural, environmental, and digital eccentricities, and the diligence to overcome them, personally as well as professionally? Are they alone, and are they likely to get lonely? Have they experienced subtropical summers, endless crowds, straight-faced bureaucrats in an autocratic regime, overtime hours, being the only non-native at a 100-person banquet?

As later chapters explain, such holistic personal profiles are not as hard to prepare as it may sound. However, to make good use of them, decision makers must avoid another frequent shortcoming of overseas appointments: to try and match them with stereotypical generalizations of conditions in China as a whole. In fact, I often advise companies to forget about China as a destination. What they must find is the best match with a specific job, in a specific place, at a specific time. Individual candidates will never have to adapt to what intercultural experts call macrocultures, in this case China, but to the specific subcultures and microcultures of the city, local community, workplace, surrounding colleagues, and fellow expats. The initial experience, and consequently the process of acclimatization, can be entirely different depending on whether newcomers live in the center or the green suburbs, work with local or foreign colleagues and how many times they had to relocate in recent years. Once the firm hired one project director at a business unit in China, the second one’s requirements might be entirely different: talking to someone who has recently gone through the same experience is invaluable in stressful situations.

When we discuss the secrets of successful expatriate careers in China, personal experience is often the first thing that seasoned foreign executives mention. “To start with, China is not for first-time expats,” Attila Hilbert of Danone echoed the opinion of several experienced HR specialists. “The culture shock is too big here, the risk of making cultural mistakes too high.” The People’s Republic stands apart from most expat destinations in terms of legal, financial, and commercial practices, political system, and administrative procedures. Regulations on routine business transactions, from the employment contracts through wire transfers to corporate mergers and acquisitions, are obscure combinations of a Soviet-style operating system, recent additions of market elements, and remnants of previous regimes. Policies can change overnight, and Chinese colleagues are so used to their fickleness that they gracefully comply without further notice. Many foreigners he met, Hilbert told me, lacked the mental agility required in such an environment, even after previous assignments in locations such as Hong Kong, Japan, or Singapore.

At Danone China, Hilbert preferred candidates with experience in challenging places like Africa, he said. They adapted much faster, which is essential even for seasoned expats. “In Pune, foreign families lived close by,” Angelo Puglisi from Benteler Automotive recalled one of India’s top expat hubs before his five years in China as Asia Pacific Head of HR and Marketing. “When we moved to Shanghai, it took time to get used to our foreign friends living an hour’s drive away.” A few years in a place with China’s size and complexity can alter someone’s mentality in many ways. One peculiarity of long-term Dragon Suits is how they dismiss contradictions between opposing beliefs. I witnessed this phenomenon every time someone described China as a diverse and cosmopolitan place, then proudly claimed to be the only foreigner around. “In the rest of China, foreigners are sprinkled and often scarce,” someone commented to a discussion on online forum Quora in 2017. “One of my friends was the only foreigner in a small town (small by Chinese standards—it had a population of 2 million people). Even in the ‘foreigner friendly areas’, you can go for a few kilometers without seeing a foreigner.”⁵⁷

Most expats who adapted to life in China have similarly mixed feelings about challenges like pollution, restricted Internet, and other annoyances, including cultural misunderstandings, crowds, the lack of nature in and around large cities, confusing expectations at work, and the country’s often anachronistic political environment. Whether they are annoyed or entertained by these peculiarities, and consequently how aptly they reap the considerable rewards of expat life in China, depends on their distinctive nature, culture, and circumstances. Single male executives with work hard, play hard philosophies fare better in Eastern Chinese metropolises than Briana’s colleague on her tormented quest to find a life partner. Briana herself, however, another lone female executive, was one of my most fulfilled interview subjects. Renata and Nicola, a young couple from South America, found a rewarding niche after their initial difficulties. “Socializing with colleagues was not part of our culture anyway, so we didn’t expect it here. We started making friends once we signed up for an EMBA course and met local people.”

In a few months, some foreigners may choose to blend neatly into the culture of their immediate surroundings, others remain obvious (and oblivious) outsiders. China’s largest cities offer enough variety for all preferences. I often nurtured the secret hope that I would be able to play China in One Word again with the same group, a few years into their stay in China, but so far that has never happened. I am convinced that impressions would be more nuanced, perhaps to the point of making it impossible to summarize them in one carefully chosen word. Even though I cannot track entire teams, I often meet individual expats years after an introductory coaching or training program they attended as new arrivals in China. Some spend their weekends rubbing shoulders with local friends in alleyway noodle shops, some over champagne brunches at five-star hotels. Some become surprisingly fluent in Mandarin, others average a new vocabulary item each year. Still, most of them share one important characteristic. While many popular expat destinations teem with backpackers, digital nomads, academics on sabbaticals, wandering artists, and affluent retirees, most foreigners in China are in the country to work. To know their lives, we must enter their offices.

 

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