ming’s musings

When the best job Mikala Reasbeck could find after finishing university in Boston was counting pills part time in a chemists for US$7 an hour, she took the drastic step of jumping on a plane to Beijing in February to look for work.

A week after she started looking, the 23-year-old from West Virginia had a full time job teaching English.

“I applied for jobs all over the US. There just weren’t any,” said Reasbeck who speaks no Chinese but had volunteered at last year’s Beijing Olympics. On the mainland, she said, “the jobs are so easy to find. And there are so many”.

Young foreigners like Reasbeck are traveling to the mainland to look for work in its unfamiliar but less bleak economy, driven by the worst job markets in decades in the United States, Europe and some Asian countries.


Alternatives to Teaching?


Many do basic work such as teaching English, a service in demand from Chinese business people and students. But a growing number are arriving with skills and experience in computers, finance and other fields.

“China is really the land of opportunity now, compared to their home countries,” said Chris Watkins, manager for China and Hong Kong group of MRI China Group, a headhunting firm. “This includes college graduates as well as maybe more established businesspeople, entrepreneurs and executives from companies around the world.”

Watkins said the number of resumes his company received from abroad had tripled over the past 18 months.

The mainland job market has been propped up by Beijing’s 4 trillion yuan (HK$4.5 trillion) stimulus, which helped to boost growth to 7.9% from a year earlier in the quarter that ended on June 30, up from 6.1% the previous quarter. The government says millions of jobs will be created this year, though as many as 12 million job-seekers will still be unable to find work.

Andrew Carr, a 23-year-old Cornell University graduate, saw the mainland as a safer alternative after offers of jobs were withdrawn due to the economic turmoil.

Passing up opportunities in New York, San Francisco and Boston, Carr started work last year at a website company that lets the public or companies advertise and pay for help in carrying out business research, getting into schools, finding people and other tasks.

“I noticed the turn the economy was taking and decided it would be best to go directly to China,” said Carr who studied Putonghua for eight years.

Accessible Alternatives Abroad

The mainland can be more accessible to job hunters than economies where getting work permits is harder, such as Russia and some EU countries. Employers need government permission to hire foreigners, but authorities promise an answer within 15 working days, compared with a wait of months or longer in other countries.

Rules were tightened ahead of the Olympics, apparently to keep out possible protesters. That forced some foreign workers to leave.

Some 217,000 foreigners held work permits at the end of last year, up from 210,000 a year earlier, according to the National Bureau of Statistics. Thousands more have temporary business visas.

Reasbeck said it took her two months to find the job in the chemists after she graduated from Boston’s Emerson College with a degree in writing, literature and publishing. She said she applied to as many as 50 employers.

Today, on top of her teaching job, she works part time recruiting other native-English-speaking teachers. She makes 14,000 to 16,000 yuan a month. “I could have a pretty comfortable life here on a not very high salary. English teachers are in high demand,” she said.

Language as a Barrier

While many jobs require at least a smattering of Putonghua, some employers in need of other skills are hiring people who do not speak it. Bangyibang.com’s founder and chief executive, Grant Yu, has five foreign employees in his 35-member workforce. Yu plans to add more and said he might hire applicants who cannot speak Putonghua if they have other skills. “I don’t believe language is the biggest obstacle in communication, as long as he or she has a strong learning ability, “Yu said.

Feng Li, a partner in a Chinese-Canadian private fund in Beijing that invests in the mining industry, said he needed native speakers of foreign languages to read legal documents and communication with clients abroad.

He plans to recruit up to six foreign employees. “We don’t need Chinese guys who speak English like me,” he said.

Attractive Benefits

One former London banker took a job a year ago with a Chinese private equity firm. He said that even though he spoke no Putonghua, his experience and contact made him a sought-after asset on the mainland.

“I actually earn more out here,” said the banker, who asked not to be identified at his Chinese employer’s request. “And the hours are shorter.”

Job hunters from other Asian countries also are taking an interest. An Kwang-jin, a 30-year-old South Korean photographer, has worked as a freelancer for a year in Qingdao. He said the mainland offered more opportunities as South Korea struggles with a sluggish economy.

Still, foreigners would face more competition from a rising number of educated, English-speaking young Chinese, some of them returning from the West, said Shaun Rein, managing director pf China Market Research group in Shanghai.

“You have a lot of Chinese from top universities who are making US$500 to US$600 a month,” Rein said. “Making a case that you are much better than they are is very hard.”