"China best country to be an expatriate"

http://www.expatexplorer.hsbc.com

I disagree with some conclusions from this survey.

I suspect that the respondent cohort (i.e., professional expats working for a Fortune 500 company) is a small subset, and quite unrepresentative, of the population of "foreigners" in China.

For example, in Beijing, there is a large group of "professional expats" living in the compounds in Shunyi (a suburb of Beijing). Although physically located in China, the "protective bubble" of the gated-expat-communities (i.e., Shunyi) is anything but the real China. Further, the expat packages are often quite generous. This group was likely surveyed.

At the other end of the scale, the WDK area of Beijing is filled with foreign students and foreign English teachers, scraping by on a meager existence. I doubt many, if any, from this group were surveyed.

In my own view, and just limiting it to Asian cities with which I have experience, Hong Kong, Singapore and most Japanese cities beat Beijing, hands down, on pretty much every parameter the survey uses. In my view, there is no comparison.

Reminds me of some of the nonsense that comes out of Mercer.

What a crap! Who wants to be an expat in Germany? May be Hamburg or Munich. In the little towns on the countryside nobody will talk with you, they hardly speak english. Ok, statistics can prove everything, especially if a big bank stands behind it

I would assume that they surveyed their own employees, HSBC likely has placed allot of expatriates globally. If they reached out from that base it would be likely into an adjacent international HSBC client base. This represents multinationals that are certainly well supported and certainly not going it on their own in anyway. It would be all within a bubble one they cannot see outside of.


I do not think anyone is or would consider the English tutors, that’s the other end of the spectrum. There certainly are not a measurable number of people immigrating to small towns anywhere. If you did take a job as a tutor outside of an urban area or even inside one your not going to have the same experiences as an executive that had all the ins and outs handled and paid for.


They are assuming that other similar mechanisms exist and they likely do, the results are likely variable but similar as larger institutionalized placement abroad is pretty much business as usual and with some gradient in results and experiences, the English tutors in China are an anomaly so would an ordinary person seeking a life as an expatriate in any provincial area of another country.


It is likely a survey of jet setting corporate adventurers.

HSBC likely manages the capital for the JV corporations in China, the capital earned has to laundered out of China.