EyalChina

Hey there, anyone in China? I'm looking at relocating in 6 months time and started doing some homework. Any thoughts about life over there? Particularily in Shanghai?

Naturally I'll be looking at stuff like cost of living, standard of living, pros and cons etc.

Cheers,
Eyal

Yorkieabroad

Hi there,
Sorry, nothing to tell you really as I've only visited Shanghai, never lived there ( I've lived in Beijng for short periods, but costs there aren't going to do you much good) but at least I'm bumping your thread up again!!

Don't often see people from china on here, so if you don't get any helpful responses, try posting on asiaxpat.com - its a much smaller, quieter board, but you may strike lucky.

Good luck on your move - it'll be fun!

EyalChina

Hey Yorkie, Thanks for the reply. I'll try Asiaxpat.com, I used it in the past when I lived in HK but forgot to check it out this time.

I'm probably only looking at Shanghai or Shenzhen at this point as I've heard bad things about weather and pollution in Beijing.

Cheers
Eyal

Desert Dweller

Forget asiaexpat.com and try www.geoexpat.com - it is a much easier site to navigate.
Shanghai's a cool place to live these days though pollution is a deal. Not as bad as Beijing of course!

Yorkieabroad

Yeah, I was in Beijing in the early spring, and that was fine - the cold air kept the pollution down a bit, but my last visit was July/August and it was not pleasant...hot, humid, dusty, polluted. still a great city though!

Yorkieabroad

Yeah, I'd forgotten about geoexpat - I never used it because the beijing forum was dead, but maybe better for shanghai

EyalChina

Looked at both Geoexpat and Asiaxpat. Seems pretty quite on both. If you can cover a few basic things on cost of living in Beijing that would useful. I know there are differences but at least it's a starting point. For example, is

Btw, do you know of any job sites which cover china (other than jobsdb)? I'll be looking to get in contact with companies in the IT industry (I'm a project manager).

Thanks!
Eyal

Desert Dweller

Did ya shout? If ya didn't then ya wont get a reply! If ya did, I'll get off my soapbox!

I know the geoexpat site pretty well and know that when people post on it they generally get a good response. They have only recently started the China forums so they need people like you to ask questions and stimulate responses.

EyalChina

Hehe yeah I put one in the Shenzhen forum:
http://www.geoexpat.com/forum/thread10111.html

And just added the same to the Shanghai one. Let's see if someone is stimulated enough

Thanks!

Yorkieabroad

Cost of every day living is extremely cheap if you go local. I had a 30 minute commute to the University, and tended to use the aircon buses which were double the non-aircon, but still only cost 2RMB! Taxi for the same trip was about 20RMB. Lunch at a noodle shop would be 5RMBish - but go to Hard Rock for a burger and you'd be up at 100RMB. We had a full peking duck dinner for 4 with a few beers at a local restaurant for 58RMB - and it was good! Local coffee would be 1RMB - but if I went for Starbucks, it was about 20RMB!!

Rent - for a new, 4 bed apartment in a condo with decent facilities (pool, gym etc) it was around 6-8000RMB, including hot water. It would be more than that in say the embasy district, but cheaper than that if you moved further out. For something similar, but a bit older nearer the university you could knock 2-3000 off, depending on state of renovation.

I used the gym facilities at the university, and I think it was 30RMB per visit - could buy membership which made sense if you were going more than 4 times a week, but I wasn't. Pool was 10RMB per swim.

Health facilities were pretty good - I think health insurance was on a par with what we were paying in Singapore.

Can't think of any other price ocomparisons at the moment, but that may give a flavour...

Sorry, don't know of any jobsites over there- again, I'd post on asiaxpat (or geoexpat) and see if anyone has any decent up to date info.

EyalChina

That's awesome. Thanks!

When you say health insurance - what sort of health insurance did you get back in Sg and also in China? When I lived in Sg I was always covered through work so didn't worry too much about getting another cover. Plus if I needed to do anything serious I'd probably go back home rather than go under a Sg surgeon's knife

Yorkieabroad

When I was working in Singapore, I was covered under my company insurance, but when I left work, I took out cover with PPP. We got them to extend the coverage to include China at no additional cost. I personally wouldn't go without decent coverage, especially on the medevac side, because that can get horrendously expensive - we had a guy medevacced from Korea to Singapore for burns treatment, and it cost over USD100k just for the lifeflight plus attendants!! We looked quite closely at the family hospitals in Beijing as we have young kids, and my wife was pregnant when we first thought we were going. The Beijing United Family Hospital (I think) appeared very good - staffed by a mix of local and expat doctors, all trained to western standards (that is not meant to sound condescending or patronising!) predominantly in Canada, but also Europe and the US. Course, thats not much use if you're in Shenzen!!

Desert Dweller

PPP is very good, we used them in Dubai and never had an issue. AXA is very good for China.

Yorkieabroad

PPP are part of the AXA group aren't they? We never really had cause to claim anything out of the ordinary (fortunately), so can't comment on how they handle a crisis, but on the day to day stuff they were fine.

EyalChina

I'll check them out.

Cheers.