I’ve worked in Mainland China for almost four years now. The first year and a half was as a recruiter for what turned out to be a fairly awful company. I want to share here my experiences working in this field and watching trends since I’ve been here. I really like what EmptyBottle.org did for TEFL in Korea and want to make the same thing for China

Visas are the most common headache for foreign teachers in China. My own wife was “deported” once because of a visa crackdown. Start processing the kind of visa before coming over – it’s much more difficult trying to get things worked out inside of China

The vast majority of private educational employers in China simply don’t have the credentials to get their foreign staff appropriate visas. The appropriate visa is a Residency Permit, usually offered in one year increments. A Z-visa is issued before the residency permit. It is almost always issued outside China, then the residency permit is issued by your local Public Security Bureau (PSB) once they’ve gotten together documents like certifications of health, a Foreign Expert Certificate, and other documents. The ability to get an education-related Foreign Expert Certificate is the hang up for most education companies. An English training company I work for now can sometimes issue their teachers a Foreign Expert Certificate as a “Media Consultant.” My own opinion is that this is fine if they can actually get it. It’s much better than the alternatives.

The alternatives are the L and F visa. The L visa is a tourist visa. Single or double entry with a 30 day duration of stay is the most common, meaning you can stay a max of two months if you time your exit right. After that you have to leave the country (there seems an entire industry of cheap guest houses in Tsim Tsua Shui in Hong Kong filled with foreigners working in China staying in HK overnight before returning back to China). WORKING ON A L-VISA IN CHINA IS ILLEGAL. You can get deported, arrested, and harassed if you’re caught working on this visa! I’ve seen it happen.

The F-Visa is the next best thing. When I worked as a recruiter I tried to get my teachers this. It’s possible to get a one year multiple entry F-visa. The duration of stay is 30 days now (I think it was longer in the past). The F visa is a business visa. It means you have business here (think: investor, corporate trainer, quality control inspector, etc) but you’re not drawing a salary (working) inside of China. These can be really easy to get with just a letter from a sponsoring company and a business card. Overall, it’s a lot more convenient than getting a new L-visa every other month and you at least have a plausible reason for being around a workplace if something happens. Again, however, WORKING ON A F-VISA IN CHINA IS ILLEGAL. You can get deported, arrested, and harassed if you’re caught working on this visa! I’ve seen it happen.

What happened to my wife is a good lessons-learned point about all this. As a Filipino she was never able to get a Residency Permit as a teacher. We also couldn’t get her an F-visa, she she was going to HK once a month to get a new L-visa. We decided to spend 10,000rmb on a one year multiple-entry F-visa. Right in the middle of this the government begins freaking out about Tibetan riots, French protesters, and the coming Olympics. Suddenly, F or L visas become hard to get for everyone. They become impossible for Filipinos, Africans, and many others.

Getting married to a Chinese resident or even having a child here does not entitle you to a visa unless you’ve been married and working for something like five years. There are also student visas which are just as illegal (but convenient) to work on as the F and L visa.

My advice is to talk to other foreign teachers at the company before you sign up to work with them. They’ll tell you honestly what the visa problem is like. It seems like some cities let you get away with working on an F or L visa, while often individual districts within cities (like Nanshan District in Shenzhen) crack down hard on schools and teachers with the wrong visa. Sometimes it’s also about the relationship (guanxi) that the owners of the school have with the local authorities that determines whether or not the police care that they have “illegal” teachers working for them.

As a final consideration, if your passport isn’t from a developed country forget about getting a residency permit as a teacher. It’s not going to happen. I’ll write another post about that sometime.