Jobs for Everyone in China??

If you read the NY Times, you may have come across this piece about "American Graduates Finding Jobs in China", which describes Shanghai and Beijing as paradises where recent graduates--denied entry into the job market at home in America--can not only easily and frequently find work, but also in positions of more responsibility than those they might have access to in the U.S. Of course, none of the fortunate youngsters interviewed in the article came to China knowing a lick of Chinese. Wonderful, huh?

What you might not have seen, unless you know where to look, is the response to the article on Danwei:

Danwei received email from two old China hand journalists yesterday regarding the New York Times story linked here:

Wise Hack A:

Here's one of those great stories that the ever lazy hack pack recycle every so often - floods of Yanks coming to China for jobs.

No evidence whatsoever for this but it gets churned out again every couple of years I note.

Wise Hack B:

Please please mention the NYT "no Mandarin required" article and what
an absolute crock of shit it is. Thanks.

Stan Abrams at China Hearsay concurs:

Sorry, that is some real skewed bullshit writing there.

For a more detailed response to the article, with practical and realistic advice on the subject, I suggest you read Shaun Rein's piece on Forbes.com. The bottom line:

One of the best ways to start a career in China is at a school. Apply for Mandarin language study for a semester, or see if you can get a job teaching English. That will get you a visa, you'll begin to learn the language and appreciate the culture, and, importantly, you'll begin to network and find out where the great job opportunities are.

Sound familiar?

Their dystopia is more Brave New World than 1984.

You may have noticed I'm less active on Facebook these days. If you're reading this now, you may also have noticed that I'm very unactive on this blog. This is in part due to the increasingly stringent bonds the Chinese government is placing on the internet here. The latest round of crackdowns occurred in response to the unrest between Uighurs and Han Chinese in the western province Xinjiang--closely watched for its tendencies to express separatist desires...

Jeremy Goldkorn, head of the ever popular China-watcher website Danwei recently wrote a piece for The Telegraph about the Chinese internet and its controls:

Savvy Chinese Internet users know how to use proxy servers and other technologies to get around the Internet blocks: Chinese government Net censorship works not because it's impossible to open websites the government does not like, but because it's inconvenient to access those sites.

So most Chinese net users, who go online primarily for entertainment, don't notice and don't particularly care about censorship, as long as they can chat to their friends, play games, listen to music and watch videos. Their dystopia is more Brave New World than 1984.

Goldkorn reported the bold-faced line was unfortunately omitted by The Telegraph's editors. This is a recommended read for an idea about internet here. It takes a deal of proxying and VPN-ing and any loophole that works before it's eradicated to get to certain websites. In some cases, we just get use to not going to certain websites anymore. YouTube seems a long way from here these days. Facebook's block has made me renew my efforts to circumvent the internet controls, as I rely so heavily on it for simple communication with friends.