Ask HN: Those who moved careers from the West to China, what's your experience?

+1 to this. If you try to live the same way as you did in the States, without trying any of the more hole-in-the-wall restaurants, and only go to like, Pizza Hut (which is considered a decent mid-end fine-dining restaurant), for sure you will spend 100 RMB+ per meal. But getting buns, dumplings, beef noodles for 10-30 RMB is in no way a remote possibility, but they definitely don't look Western.

Not to discount the value of your experience in HK, but I feel compelled to point out that in all practical aspects (legal, fiscal, market, visas, business culture, transport, food, education, medical, etc.), certainly for anyone who has spent time in the mainland, Hong Kong isn't even remotely the same as living and working in China.

The reason you find it hard to find experiences is that there aren't a lot of us who stick around.

Across most of China the dominant foreigner is the young visitor, maybe as a student, maybe teaching English. There are also some old English teaching hold-outs, married people running F&B businesses, and a few traders (the imported wine merchant is a classic). Other professionals are rare outside of major cities and industrial areas, save occasional NGO/intergovernmental projects, conferences and trade shows. Travelers are pretty rare. To over-generalize, the type of media these people leave online is usually somewhere between "OMG squat toilet!" and "found a McDonalds!", to "selfie at [landmark]" or "[me picking up locals]".

I've done my time: 18 years here, and only hospitalized for salmonella three times! About half-way through I went back to the west for 2 years, then came back to China. I've also taken an extra year out. The short answer is the situation has been changing frequently. It's a lot more expensive now (cost of living), visa rules have changed greatly, the government is getting more aggressive at taxing foreigners, there are still few decent jobs for foreigners (outside of multinationals who generally fill them via internal transfer from elsewhere), and the domestic economy is in slowdown. It's a great place for hardware businesses, mostly due to supply chain. The manufacturing isn't the cheapest anymore. Legals and government are a pain in the ass.

My advice? If you want the language, you have to stay, and if you're going to stay, make sure to study a few hundred characters, and study basic Chinese history. You'll get far more out of your stay with no additional overhead after covering those basics. If you want a job from someone else, go elsewhere unless you bring experience and are in to career track stuff like management consulting, marketing strategy or some other kind of middle management where international perspective can add some value. If you want to start something in hardware, it's better to do it off-books and base yourself somewhere cheap near the border, eg. border-hopping Hong Kong/Shenzhen, or nearby in Vietnam, Philippines, Thailand, etc.

Running a company here is a real grind. Everything is a hassle: government, banking, visas, lawyers, logistics, medical, education, internet, business culture/negotiations, etc. It's not cheap anymore either.

Personally I couldn't live in most of the country due to lack of nature, pollution, cold winters. I've lived in Shanghai, Qingdao, various parts of Yunnan, Shenzhen and Zhuhai. Don't get me wrong though, China is fascinating, represents and allows you to better understand a massive chunk of humanity, and has some of the best history, nature and food on the planet. Happy to answer any specific questions.

> Given that I'm 22, and have spent the majority of my internship/working career in China

i assume this is a typo? otherwise i'm a little concerned about a culture where a 22-year-old has that much work experience, haha.

curious if you could talk a little more about the experience of finding a job in china, and what differences there might be from applying for jobs in the west.

and not sure if you have any experience with this - there's quite a bit in this thread about it being difficult if you're not ethnically chinese, but is there discrimination against overseas ethnic chinese who are not familiar with the language or culture?

for context - i'm thinking about working in china for a few years, primarily to build fluency and an understanding of the culture. i'm western-born; my mandarin is 'pretty good' but it's obvious from my accent and the way i put together sentences that i'm not native. i'm concerned that i might not be afforded the same leniency in misunderstanding the language or cultural norms that non-chinese westerners might receive.

Meanwhile, a comparable group of people keep spreading the image that unifying with China cause no harm. What do you say then? Taiwan is a divided society as always.

The truth is, it just seems that nobody cares about politics here anymore. Taiwanese media have been so sick that gossip is more than serious news. And guess what, most of the cable TV channels are Chinese-funded nowadays.

So when you say "The only problem is that they constantly have China talking about how they want to invade and retake it," you are either lying, or you have other intentions.