Living in China

Working in China means contending with a job market that gives little ground to outsiders. Hiring leans on local ties and a record built inside the country, and English carries only within certain fields, science and research chief among them. The money itself is steadier than the hiring, with pay around the middle of the world and the cost of a normal life beside it, tax leaving most of what you earn, and a solid margin at month's end. It is a place that rewards those who can find a way in more than it eases the finding.

China has the world's second-largest diaspora. Some 11.7M Chinese live abroad, trailing only India, and that number has grown 13% over the past decade. The community is split between the Chinese-speaking world and the West: 2.5M live in Hong Kong and the same number in the United States, with Japan a distant third. Against a population of 1.4 billion, the foreign-born presence inside China is tiny, at about 1.6 million.