Jeremy Goldkorn has hung out in Beijing for six years, drifting from job to job. He taught English for a while. Then he worked at a magazine. After that, he bounced between Beijing and U.S. Silicon Valley. In 2001, he resettled in Beijing to work at a Chinese-English bilingual magazine. But he quit the job after nearly a year. "Mostly because I wanted to do my own thing," he explains, "China is a superb place if you want to get your teeth into different types of creative work."

Nowadays, China seems to be swarmed with foreigners who are drifting from one job to another before finally getting one that they really enjoy. They are seizing upon the growing demands for talented individuals in media, finance, trading and other fields. On the other hand, however, native Chinese cannot meet this kind of demand. Meanwhile, some western firms have stopped sending foreign natives to China because of high costs. Instead, they are fixing their eyes on a labor pool of westerners--estimated at 300,000--who have decided to settle in China. "You're in a market that's growing at 10 % a year, so there's a market here for whatever you want to do," says Kaiser, a musician who came to China 10 years ago. Until the late 1990s, China did not permit foreigners to stay long-term if they were in China not for diplomacy, university study, etc. In the past five years, however, Beijing has relaxed restrictions in order to attract foreign investment and foreign staff. As a result, the number of foreigners in China has increased fivefold. According to the statistics by Chinese responsible department, the biggest group of foreigners in China is Americans whose total number is approximately 110 thousand. Half of them live in Beijing and Shanghai and the rest are scattered across mainland China.

Similar occupations

Foreigners who speak Mandarin and have specific skills are most likely to find a job, according to Jim Leininger, general manager in the Beijing office of the human-resources consultancy Watson Wyatt Worldwide. They may land jobs in areas such as finance, media and advertising that emphasize creativity and innovation, because Chinese educational system has been weak in these areas.

First jobs of these western drifters often include working as a clerk in Chinese media or public-relations firm, doing freelance work for local magazines and monitoring a Chinese rock band. Most of the foreigners learn Chinese in their spare time. Their classic starter job is teaching English, sometimes at top universities if they are lucky enough. They can earn 4000 to 5000 yuan per month. But some of them find jobs at private schools, not because of their high teaching skills but their foreign appearances. Some foreigners work as freelancers for bilingual magazines, which is not a hard job. If they write for a travel magazine, they can get a lot of chances to visit interesting places. They can earn 7000 to 8000 yuan a month.

By Peopls's Daily Online