Hi. As I write this I am new to the forum but not really new to China. Also at the time of this writing China is concluding another academic year and preparing to hire for the fall. I'm seeing a lot of posts from potential foreign teachers who are getting ready to make the leap into the middle kingdom. I wish them the best of luck in their journey. I'm also a little concerned. There appears to be a a trend towards needless worry about landing a job at a university at this time of the year. Now, while I think the job market here is tightening and offers are not improving in correspondence to inflation and recruiters are now dominating and squatting upon job offers from universities that once used to do their own recruiting like food hoarders during famine, the market here is still fertile enough to land a relatively adequate job. There's no need to worry about finding a job, though there are other things I think prospective, first time, China bound foreign teachers should worry about. I worry that desperation over nailing down a specific job or seemingly any job could lead someone unfamiliar with China down a very unpleasant path. I speak from personal experience.
Years ago, when I made the life altering decision to live and work in China I encountered similar feelings of bewilderment, nervousness and disappointment. I papered more employers than I can recall. I sent all of the materials you're supposed to send, assembled a c. v. that I thought was a "guaranteed hit," and I had the genuine qualifications to match. I had experience in the field, references ready to go to bat for me, and I matched pretty much every desired trait employers here like (except gender. There's an inverted chauvinism here where employers prefer female candidates, but that's not much of an issue more than it is a personal observation). I wondered what I could have done "wrong" in my search and I started to question if I was even going to be able to find a decent job. I sought advice from a self-proclaimed English teaching internet "cafe" and received about a pound of horse shit and bitter vitriol, and another pound of varied, then-unknown-to-me baseless and conflicting options posing as facts. I was absolutely confused regarding what to make of what I perceived as a "competitive" job market. With every day that passed I grew wearier and desperate. I started to rationalize that I just needed to get my foot "in the door," and after a semester or year at a university I'd be on the ground floor to a greater market of jobs, and being in-country, a university would have to be foolish to disregard my credentials. I am not trying to overstate my credentials. Pardon me if it reads that way. I possess fairly decent credentials by China foreign teaching standards, but nothing extraordinary (like a master's degree or a doctorate). I reckoned that if the schools would just give me an interview then I'd be swimming in offers. Surely, if the cretins on that English teaching "cafe" had jobs at Chinese universities I was definitely a viable candidate.
I naively thought that I should have been landing a job as soon as possible. I had a lot of ducks to put in a row before I departed, so the sooner I had a job locked in the easier my transition would be.
That's how it works in theory, but China is a nation where Murphy's Law applies all of the time. It's easy to say this from the vantage point of being here, and I think that no matter how many times it is reiterated, what most first timers think they "know" about living in China, based upon whatever sources they've read, watched or listened to: everything that you know about China is absolutely nothing like what you'll learn once you're here. No matter how hard you try to internalize that you think you know what those of us living here are saying, you are only truly grasping the tip of the iceberg. Once you're here, and have been surviving for a few months, then that revelatory, exclamatory, "Oh! Yeah....." hits you. Everything you were told before you came: it truly is something you recognize all the way into your bones. I am off on this tangent with a reason: all of that uncertainty and doubt you may be feeling as you keep hustling to land a job, it can blind you into making decisions that you might later come to regret. When it comes to mainland China, such mistakes can hit you harder that you can possibly fathom.
A year in China can turn into a year in hell. I wouldn't want anyone to fall into that trap, so I hope that I can offer you some advice by recommending that you scrutinize every little bit of a job offer. Do not hesitate to ask questions. Don't let them bully you or bullshit you into a false sense of security, or harass your spirit with a, "take it or leave it, chump" attitude. Please do not sell yourself short by feeding into the uncertainty. There is no reason why you should be jumping into any offer because you assume nobody is interested, or nobody wants, needs, nor requires your services.
Stick to the pay you want, the hours you want, and the benefits you feel entitled to. Do not devalue yourself because the way business and management works in China is wholly predicated upon uncertainty and confusion. The longer someone leaves you hanging, the least amount of information they have to give you, the more brash and brazen they react to your requirements, the more the people hiring you make you feel insecure and dependent upon them: the more you're going to fuck yourself out of what you want. If a school doesn't get back to you after you've put in a lot of legwork and made several attempts, you need to realize that in China you might be better off if you don't go where you're not wanted. Settling for "second best," here can set off a domino effect of misery, and if you're going to sacrifice regular contact with your friends, family, culture, and civil liberties and individual freedoms for some yuan, you shouldn't have to suffer.
With this long winded opinion and bit of advice, I offer some bullet points you might want to consider before you accept a position. These are points that don't get brought up enough when people offer advice to prospective foreign teachers, and these are things your potential employers cannot or will not tell you.
1. Scour the internet to compare salaries and other packages from universities in the city in which the university you're negotiating with claims to be located. You might find that you're being given a shit offer, and fed a bigger line of bollocks from a foreign affairs officer. You should know what you can negotiate. They will do everything in their power to counter your demands. Some will plant their feet in the mud and never budge. They need your more than you need them. Do you really want to work for people who view you as a disposable cog, and won't work with you to ensure that you are given incentives that make you want to come and work in this crazy county?
2. They need you more than you need them.It's worth repeating. Foreign affairs officers bluff more often than not, and some actually prefer to not have to hire another foreign teacher if their school has a few. They can simply force the overtime on a current hire, and pocket the rest. They may even get brownie points for saving the university money. Hell, some foreign affairs officers have a job for life thanks to guanxi, and their job security is not threatened in the slightest if their university does not land foreign instructors. So, if they cannot even negotiate slightly then they're not worth working for. Chinese universities aren't usually bastions of joy anyway.
Some schools might not be able to offer substantially more than they already advertise. This is occasionally true, but there are other things you can negotiate for if you find yourself wanting to live in a particular location, and you like most of what you’re being offered. If they can’t rise pay, negotiate fewer hours. Negotiate for an abbreviated work week (this may mean longer days, but fewer total days and thus enable you to actually travel around your city and/or China, and to pursue activities that add to your quality of life.
3. Contrary to popular opinion: you don’t come to China to get rich by teaching. So, what about quality of life?Seriously, some university positions pay a bare minimum but some also ask for very little. Working 24 hours at one university for six thousand renmenbi, versus 12 hours for four thousand: which is better? If you want to make money, you can easily make more than six a month and work less than 24 hours if you are in a large city and negotiate a light work schedule spread over the fewest number of days possible. If you want to learn Chinese, or have other pursuits and hobbies you’d like to entertain, then taking the smaller offer is the way to go.
You are sacrificing a lot to be here, so having a comfortable life is important. For some that means making a lot of money. For others it may mean working the least amount of hours possible with the least amount of responsibility. They want to be able to survive from what they earn but they have other interests. They work to live, rather than live to work, so for such individuals a limited schedule takes priority over substantial pay (hopefully they don’t pander to the lowest paying jobs out of some sort of odd form of cultural relativism. We should be raising the base offers of salary in this country!)
You can lead a relatively happy existence in China, but it requires carving out your niche and making it happen.
4. As time goes by, the number of universities hiring in China are NOT located in the actual city they claim. This is the norm. The chances of actually being in that city you're fallen in love with form pictures and posts and blogs may very well be slim. In China you are more likely to commute to a "life," than commute to your work. This sucks more than you may ever be accustomed to.Since the early part of this decade, numerous universities both pubic and private, were mandated to build new, “modern” campuses throughout China. What this means is that they go to backwaters and undeveloped hillsides and slap a metric ton of concrete, glass and steel together and hope to become some kind of boom-town one day. Few are. Beijing apparently wants all universities to be in the middle of nowhere and far from any “distractions.” Granted, these distractions are merely conveniences (not just applicable by western standards, but for locals too) and do nothing to really help with the quality of education (where cheating, bribery, plagiarism and a general lack of learning anything practical is obscenely rampant; with no reform, nor end in sight).
If a foreign affairs officer tells you that the school is, “thirty minutes from the city center,” that means it’s at least an hour away. This relativism is rampant. Sometimes it’s an intentional bit of bullshitting to sucker in another foreign, native speaking body. Sometimes it’s coming from someone who has the luxury of living off campus and being chauffeured by the university buses back into the city, or they own an automobile.
What may slip your mind is the fact that these “educational development zones” may only have a few buses running to and from the campus, and on an incredibly limited schedule (imagine 5 a. m. until 6-9 p. m.) and will always be crowded and they stop at every corner of the known universe before reaching the city center. They’re the hick express, and you’ll receive that vibe fast. Flagging down a taxi from the city to return to the campus may prove difficult depending on where you are located. They will always be expensive by local standards, and once you grow accustomed to seeing how far your money can or cannot be spread you’ll acclimate yourself to the standard and find it’s blowing a considerable amount of cash for a considerable inconvenience.
A school located in a “suburb” that falls under the administration of the distant, larger city proper does not mean it’s in that city, regardless of what a foreign affairs officer tells you.
5. Just because they work with you doesn’t mean they understand you.After living here for a while, you’ll find that Chinese will often settle not for “Second best,” but the bottom of the barrel. Be wary of any foreign affairs officer who tells you how “convenient,” your living conditions will be. Many foreign affairs officers have never traveled abroad. What they consider “convenient,” or, “acceptable,” will not even come close to what you’re culturally accustomed to. Some officers do not mean to intentionally mislead and falsely assure you of something. They simply only see things through one lens and that lens has very little cultural familiarity with what you are accustomed to. This may not fully sink in until you get here, but it will. You really need to research a school with extreme vigilance. If there’s little information out there then consider giving the position a miss.
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I could go on, but I’ve spent far too much free time on this post. Perhaps other posters will add to the list. I assume I’ll post more questions worth considering later, but I need a break!
Good luck with your job search. Don’t sell yourself short by giving into the uncertainty. Keep applying and keep searching. You’ll find work that is suitable for you. It just won’t happen as quickly and conveniently and professionally as we are accustomed to in the west.