Comment by epynonymous | Hacker News Reader

Comment by epynonymous | Hacker News Reader

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1. large metropolitan population (1M+) 2. city, urban environment (i.e. skyscrapers, concrete jungle) 3. safe 4. good hospitals 5. airport must be international with frequent flights to major cities like london, nyc, sfo, etc 6. has a great high tech environment with lots of high tech companies 7. speaks at least 1 of the languages that i speak 8. good education environment (elementary - university) 9. not that cold 10. great food (yet to find somewhere where this isn't true) 11. must have excellent broadband (100M broadband) 12. there exists an official apple store and shopping is relatively convenient where i don't have to wait weeks or months to get new stuff i.e. i remember having to wait several weeks or months before when growing up in the suburbs, had to wait a long time for sony ps2's 12. good transportation system (subway, rail, etc)

some others that didn't make the list:

* must know people, i actually didn't know anyone when i moved to atlanta, boston, tokyo, or shanghai, i ended up making a lot of friends in each place, so i don't find this to be a requirement. * family close by, i think this is more important as i get older, i used to want to get as far away from my parents as possible, now, even though i don't live remotely close to my father, i yearn for the days where i could see him regularly. * great weather, meaning warm usually and good air quality. since i'm in the city, the air quality's not that great, so i've come to deal with it, it's important, but i've never prioritized based on this.

i live in shanghai, it fits all of the requirements above, great city, safe, lots of good high tech companies, just that my family is in the states, and the air quality could be better.

Pretty much the same reason I chose Shenzhen in 2016, after living in-and-out of the country for many years on extended business trips.

Anything except for Internet is there. You may have a gigabit line to your desktop, but even internal Chinese Internet will be screeching slow unless you visit a site with an own CDN in every city.

I also worked in Shanghai on a 6 month assignment once. Line 2 rush hour commute was an everyday near death experience (commuting in between Lujiazui and high tech park where chip cos were.)

How does a person from the west move to China? Chengdu interests me.

I got a job at the American branch of a Chinese company (Microsoft). It works for tier ones, not sure how you go about getting a tech job in a tier 3 city like Chengdu. You could probably teach English though, lots of opportunities still.

i'd imagine much the same process as working anywhere else abroad, you need to find work so that a company can sponsor a visa for you, to find a job start checking websites of target companies, there are a lot of multi-national companies here, if you speak/write mandarin chinese, that would be helpful.

Oh my... do not chose cities in the middle of nowhere in China. Only megacities there "work" for a Western person

Why?

Very hard for legal reasons: i.e. you go to a hotel, but they can't accept you because they have to blanks for police registration of foreigners, or PSB not being able to register your household simply because they have no computer system to do so, and there are no option for a foreigner to file for a residence registration on paper. Not to say, your Mandarin should be as good as that of locals, along the knowledge of local dialect if you venture far inland.

Unless you're fluent in chinese, it will be extremely difficult to get around in these tier 3 cities like chengdu. Shanghai and beijing are a bit more international, but even stilll, english is relatively scarely spoken. Just imagine having to go to the doctors', that would be extremely traumatic.

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