I can recommend a YouTube channel from a couple Westerners who have lived in China for years and share their experiences about it, https://www.youtube.com/advchina -- the slightly older of whom is http://youtube.com/serpentza who lives in Shenzhen.

They tackle a lot of the issues you bring up. China is very protective of their immigration, and unlike the US, it's impossible to get the equivalent of a Green Card or become a citizen at all, even if you marry a Chinese person, which they both have done. You constantly have to jump through hoops to keep a current Visa, and as a foreigner you must report in person to the nearest police station each month to be monitored, or face deportation.

The police will also sometimes randomly come to your apartment unannounced, and come in to check on you.

There exists a huge range of living situations that span from the more western first tier cities like Shanghai and Shenzhen, that are very organized, with a police presence that cuts down on lawless driving, unlicensed food vendors, etc, to the more rural areas where the bulk of the population still lives.

Anyway, they both cover a lot of the issues you raise, and have a ton of good videos that give you a sense of what contemporary life is like there.

The apartment thing...it’s very rare. Most likely to remind you to register at the PSB, I was always late and warned a few times, they never tried to fine me or anything. They aren’t really “checking” on you, honestly I’ve had worse experiences in Switzerland than China where they really do check on you (like the television tax guy entering my apartment to check that I really didn’t have a TV!).

Beijing was actually more lawless than the other first tier cities. The police are kind of paralyzed when they could easily pull over someone with enough guanxi to end there careers.

Wow, I hadn't considered that the Beijing police would be too fearful to inadvertently pull over a high ranking party member to conduct their jobs properly.

Meanwhile, for contrast regarding fear of politicians: In my London borough, my local ex Member of Parliament a few years back praised police after they used anti-terror powers to stop him while he was taking pictures of a bike path...

Television licencing property checks are normal in the UK as well - I've had a few inspectors demand access to my home to verify that I wasn't watching TV illegally. For a long time there used to be "TV detector vans" that would drive around areas supposedly detecting TVs in use in unlicensed properties - I believe it was ( still is? ) illegal to publish any information surrounding the efficacy of these vehicles ( Obviously because they don't work ).

> Obviously because they don't work

In the days of analogue TV, they almost certainly did. Analogue CRT televisions put out a tremendous amount of spurious RF. The intermediate frequency from the receiver's local oscillator was easily detected from some distance, even with inexpensive amateur equipment. With more sophisticated equipment, it wouldn't be difficult to see exactly what was on the screen using Van Eck phreaking. With modern technology, you could build a working TV detector bicycle using nothing more than an Android tablet, an RTL-SDR stick and a home-made yagi.

I think that the secrecy was about how often TV detection technology was actually used. The BBC research department could have knocked together a working TV detector van in a spare afternoon, but it would have been prohibitively expensive to operate. Why send out two skilled broadcast engineers in a van full of equipment, when an empty van being driven by a debt collector will do the job?

Yes, I was saying that the vans themselves obviously don't work, evidenced by the legislation - not that it's technologically infeasible. It does however reflect on the nature of the UK that an effectively private organisation is granted legal protections to assist them in enforcing a monopoly over a technology with a racket, that looks a lot like something out of a dystopian fantasy.

> I've had a few inspectors demand access to my home to verify that I wasn't watching TV illegally

Ask to see their warrant or tell them to get lost. They have no power of entry, possibly unless accompanied by the po po (in which case ask the same question and "Am I legally obliged to comply with this officer?", while videoing them and their response).

Confirmation: http://www.tvlicensing.co.uk/about/foi-administering-the-lic...

> Enquiry officers do not have any legal powers to enter your home without a search warrant granted by a magistrate (or sheriff in Scotland). > You have no obligation to grant entry to an enquiry officer if you don’t wish to do so.

Fortunately you have no obligation to allow TV inspectors access to your property and you can call the police on them if they continue to harass you.

I love these guys. Came here to link them. I suggest anyone watch these videos. They cover those topics as well as Visa issues and censorship.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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?

The car thing is true, but it is more prevelant among the blue trucks. One of my friends lost a father this way. However, it isn’t that common. Sometimes you’ll encounter some guy in the middle of the street lying down waiting for someone to help them, who they will then accuse of causing them to be hurt in the first place...chinese law and police just aren’t developed enough to avoid these kinds of scams. However, it isn’t super common anymore, and you have to find a grizzled expat to bear these stories.

For the most part they are just stories you talk about in a bar. It won’t effect you personally, not like the air pollution which finally convinced me to leave.

We probably hear mostly about the sensationally negative things the most because they drive clicks.

The same could be said about all the negative news coming out of the US. Why would anyone want to move there? And yet they do, and many thrive.

I'm sure China is thriving, despite its problems.

The problem is best illustrated with things like road deaths.

If you look at road deaths for China, it’s something like 20 per 100k people per year vs maybe 2-3 in the UK.

What that means is, statistically China is 8-10 times “worse” than the UK.

Does it mean you’re going to be seeing car crashes everywhere all the time? No.

Does it mean China’s road safety is much worse? Yes.

Things are much worse in China in a variety of meaningful respects. Does that mean it’s impossible to live there? Not at all.

If we instead go onto crime;

If you look at violent crime we have 6 times more robberies, 4 times more murders and 18 times more gun crime in the USA compare to China (per capita)

Does it mean you're going to be seeing people getting shot everywhere all the time? No.

Does it mean general safety in the US is much worse? Yes.

Things are much worse in USA in a variety of meaningful respects. Does that mean it's impossible to live there? Not at all. Well, if you can stand having Trump as the president of the country you live in.

General safety is worse in china if you include traffic accidents. Crime safety is better in china.

You are unlikely to be affected in any case. Though I did know of stupid foreigners who became crippled after stupidity on motor scooters.

Adding to the other comments if you thought the whole rhino horn medicine idea was bad wait till you hear about inflicting pain to animals to make the meat more delicious.

Having just been in Beijing and Shanghai for a significant period of time, I can say both of those cities are fairly modern with a flair of western living standards (aside from the fact that most people don't speak English). I can't speak to anywhere else, though I'm excited to visit a number of more rural cities this year.

It's pretty true, speaking from experience. China is a pretty harsh place to live. But since this is hacker news, here are some links:

- Viral footage shows bystanders doing nothing as Chinese woman is attacked in hotel https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/worldviews/wp/2016/04/06...

- Preschools across China to be inspected after ‘series of child abuse cases’ http://www.scmp.com/news/china/society/article/2121495/presc...

- Air pollution suspected for sharp rise in China lung cancer rate http://www.scmp.com/news/china/society/article/2106410/air-p...

- In China, the water you drink is as dangerous as the air you breathe https://www.theguardian.com/global-development-professionals...

- Man in China sentenced to five years' jail for running VPN https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/dec/22/man-in-china-s...

- Steam Community allegedly banned in China https://dotesports.com/general/news/steam-banned-china-19631

- The disappeared: Accounts from inside China's secret prisons http://www.cnn.com/2017/11/23/asia/china-lawyers-disappeared...

I would say from who I meet at expat bars/events in China, 80% of them are English teachers. They're there because there's no other skillsets for them to utilize in their home country, or they're just seeking new experiences before going back home. the rest 20% are there because their companies sent them there (but they'll go back sooner or later)

Money talks.