[strebler]

I've lived and done a fair amount of business there. The car thing is true. I would say people there care a lot more about their immediate network of friends / family and a lot less about anyone else. It's very safe to live there, but at the same time everyone's trying to take advantage of everyone else - literal and metaphorical pickpockets are everywhere.

The inherent lack of trust makes workplace environments really difficult. Everyone's looking out for number one (themselves), to the point of damaging their own company for personal gain. You have no clue how hard it is to build a software dev team when ANY of the developers will happily copy the source code they have access to onto a thumbdrive and sell it to your top competitor for a modest payday. I highly respect anyone who builds a software team successfully in China, such a headache.

Frankly, the internet censorship was the deal breaker for me. No Google, gmail, facebook, twitter, news, etc, is just too much to bear.

But the food was really good, good weather and foreigners are treated like minor celebrities (everyone is really really friendly), so we don't experience real China like everyone else.

[anthonyleecook]

yup, I've heard many stories of expats turning around and leave the second they found the internet frustrating, which is strange that they didn't do their homework before coming.

Also, the food I found ok; lack of variety (hot pot, shaokao, dumpling, repeat), and no good international cuisines. You can also get safer Chinese food in Taiwan or Los Angeles. As for weather, it's usually made worse by pollution. And recently, foreigners have been treated with disdain by locals because of nationalism.

[strebler]

The internet was actually fine for a long time (just proxy over SSH for everything). But they randomly "turn up the dials" on the firewall to block SSH and so you'll get intermittent outages. It's gotten progressively worse. We had a bunch of servers outside of China and I would need to basically round robin them to keep online.

I was actually somehow impressed by how sophisticated the firewall became over time from a pure technology point of view. Super annoying though.

[sharkdesk]

to be clear, white foreigners are treated like minor celebrities.

[nojvek]

White foreigners are treated like celebrities in almost every non-western country.

That’s what we sort of mean by white previlege. Thanks to Hollywood movies and music + beauty ads with predominantly white people.

[client4]

When you go back, using Google Fi and hotspotting has been a fantastic experience.

[Nullabillity]

Fi is so hilariously overpriced that it's hard to imagine anyone seriously buying into it. Is $20 + $10/GB actually the cheapest available.. anywhere?