People online, and especially newspapers, always act like China is having a gig nightmare, and that everyone is stuck in unemployment hell. But they obviously don’t see the totality of the economy, they are just looking at one number or another. A large number of unemployed people can be good because that can be a long period of personal, consensual downtime from work.
This sort of life being possible in China makes me desire immigration to non-major city areas over there. I only have concerns of freedom of information and access to the greater internet- censorship on a national firewall level is something I’m simply not able to tolerate.
IMPORTANT: I am an American with a public education, and have no real knowledge of what life’s like there in terms of freedoms. I’ve just heard things.
Would you mind going into a bit of detail about how accessing the greater internet works over there? That is, if you know anything. I think I am correct in assuming you are not currently residing there. Would love another’s take on this.
The big issue with immigrating directly to China is that you will only be allowed to stay in their higher tier cities, this is because of the Hukou system which treats every region of China like its own country with visa restrictions, essentially. Its great for preserving cultures but not so great if you like to travel a lot. So its unlikely that you could take advantage of the collective lands rules as a foreigner unless you married into a family in an area with collective lands. You can obviously visit any region of China but visas/hukou do have limits if you try to go for residency.
There are some loopholes to getting Chinese citizenship, you can move to for example Taiwan or Hong Kong, get residency / citizenship in those places, and then the mainland would consider you a citizen by proxy. But usually if you’re moving from one region to another you can only live in the higher tier cities. You can read a little more about it here https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hukou
Its great for preserving cultures but not so great if you like to travel a lot.
Possibly but that wasn’t the intent of the Hukou system. It’s goal was the prevention of massive slums forming on the borders of the majority cities during rapid modernisation (which in turn leads to rapid urbanisation). There is currently massive hukou reform ongoing such as restrictions effectively being lifted for cities under 3 million population.
Thanks a lot! This is invaluable to know and look into before I ever begin to seriously considering uprooting my life. I wouldn’t mind going through the paces to attain a life I find desirable, but it depends on how prohibitive things are if the time comes to make decisions like this.
People online, and especially newspapers, always act like China is having a gig nightmare, and that everyone is stuck in unemployment hell. But they obviously don’t see the totality of the economy, they are just looking at one number or another. A large number of unemployed people can be good because that can be a long period of personal, consensual downtime from work.
This sort of life being possible in China makes me desire immigration to non-major city areas over there. I only have concerns of freedom of information and access to the greater internet- censorship on a national firewall level is something I’m simply not able to tolerate.
IMPORTANT: I am an American with a public education, and have no real knowledge of what life’s like there in terms of freedoms. I’ve just heard things.
Would you mind going into a bit of detail about how accessing the greater internet works over there? That is, if you know anything. I think I am correct in assuming you are not currently residing there. Would love another’s take on this.
The big issue with immigrating directly to China is that you will only be allowed to stay in their higher tier cities, this is because of the Hukou system which treats every region of China like its own country with visa restrictions, essentially. Its great for preserving cultures but not so great if you like to travel a lot. So its unlikely that you could take advantage of the collective lands rules as a foreigner unless you married into a family in an area with collective lands. You can obviously visit any region of China but visas/hukou do have limits if you try to go for residency.
There are some loopholes to getting Chinese citizenship, you can move to for example Taiwan or Hong Kong, get residency / citizenship in those places, and then the mainland would consider you a citizen by proxy. But usually if you’re moving from one region to another you can only live in the higher tier cities. You can read a little more about it here https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hukou
Possibly but that wasn’t the intent of the Hukou system. It’s goal was the prevention of massive slums forming on the borders of the majority cities during rapid modernisation (which in turn leads to rapid urbanisation). There is currently massive hukou reform ongoing such as restrictions effectively being lifted for cities under 3 million population.
Thanks a lot! This is invaluable to know and look into before I ever begin to seriously considering uprooting my life. I wouldn’t mind going through the paces to attain a life I find desirable, but it depends on how prohibitive things are if the time comes to make decisions like this.
Also are you in USA? Afaik there are new rules for Canada that are more lenient