Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by est31 21 days ago
I've never been to China either. It's a huge country and it probably depends on where you are (hong kong probably friendlier than a random place in the mainland), but from what I heard/read:

* language issues. Many chinese don't speak english. Also a problem in many european countries (esp latin and slavic speaking ones), but at least the european languages are easier to learn. Compare this to Amsterdam, Goteborg, Berlin-Mitte or Kopenhagen where everyone speaks english.

* citizenship is one of the hardest to get in the world.

* I heard complaints about onboarding into the chinese app/digital ID ecosystem.

2 comments

On HK you can get permanent residence after I believe 5 years of working in there. That said… you will need a HIGH paying job to be able to achieve that. China mainland has a similar thing (‘green card’) but the requirements are kinda unobtainable for anyone below CEO of Starbucks level
Tangent, but I’m really curious what country you’re from that uses the endonym for Göteborg but then also spells the capital of Denmark like Kopenhagen?
I'm born and raised German, and above I mostly used the German ways of writing the town names (stripping the umlaut). Which as it turns out are not the same way you'd write it in english, interesting!
I'm pretty certain all languages do that. It's fairly common to bastardize/assimilate the names of important cities and/or trade hubs into the local language, but leave smaller names unchanged. That's why it's Milano/Milan, Venezia/Venice but Cagliari doesn't have an americanized name; that's why it's Moskva/Moscow but still Irkutsk; Warszawa/Warsaw, Gdansk/Danzig (in German), Katowice/Kattowitz (in German), etc.