Teachin in Smaller Areas of China??

[Irisher]

I plan on teaching in China next year and have just started the search process. I am not too interested in being in large cities or towns. I would really like to be in a rural area. What should I be looking for? What are the opportunities?? What would those of you who are 'Old China Hands' advise???

Thank you for any help you can give.

[bewolff]

Going to small cities is a good idea if you want to work on learning Chinese. In larger cities you will likely encounter more foreigners and more people who can speak English, and will have little pressure to learn Chinese. However rural areas lack access to some things you will probably come to miss (certain food products primarily). Being in close proximity to some city will enable you to get some things you will want, but still enjoy the advantages of a rural area. Rural areas are plagued yet with "Guanxi" driven equity systems, unfairness towards women, ignorance of laws, and a general lack of social ediquette. There will be a greater measure of culture shock in rural areas. You will need to have a way to cope with that. Rural areas can also mean dirtier (trash in the streets) or polluted (eye watering constant haze). Don't believe a single thing a 'recruiter' says.

Also, on language...because of the many area dialects where you go is an important consideration. Some areas in the south have very little Putonghua. Perhaps you will only encounter it at the school you teach at. See if you can get your school to agree to one or two Chinese classes a week as part of you contract. Get the Pimsleur recordings to move your Chinese forward now so you have a good base once you get here.

Rural areas also usually mean less money (maybe 1000 less on average). Pay attention to this. Figure out how many hours your will be working and divide into the salary amount. Small cities cost less to live in. Larger cities cost more. It does not seem like much when you think in western salary levels, but living here, traveling here, buying food here...you will want to earn as much as you can.

[Irisher]

Thank you very much - information such as that is not to be found in books. Thank you again : )

[Crivens200]

I'm not a teacher but a lot of my friends here in Nantong are. It's a small city in Jiangsu province, about 3 hours from Shanghai by bus. There are loads of teachers here and also quite a few in the outlying smaller towns. The teachers in the city tend to be happier as there's more to do - a few bars, restaurants etc. Also, the teachers in the small towns tend to come in here at the weekend due to lack of stuff to do where they are based. They say getting decent food in the small towns is a hassle as well.

One other problem is that there is no chinese language programme in any of the colleges here so it's difficult to find someone with experience of teaching chinese to foreigners.

One advantage of living in a smaller place is that it's easier to make friends. There are so many foreigners in SH/BJ that if you see one in the street you walk past with head down and ignore them. In Nantong if you see a foreigner you'll stop and chat and have an instant drinking buddy. I've certainly more decent friends in Nantong now than when I lived in BJ or SH.

[Irisher]

Many thanks - this is all excellent information : )

[sunpixy]

I agree to what bewolff has said. As a Chinese native speaker who had been staying in a big city for years and just moved to a small one for the sake of work, I still have to spend time adapting myself to the surroundings. My suggestion is to stay in a relatively bigger city and visit the nearby rural areas from time to time when needed. You may have a full time teaching job in the bigger city, and, so far as I know, there are quite a few international or local NGOs in rural areas, rather, in the smaller city nearby the bigger city and also the rural areas (Hmm sorry it is a little like tongue twisters). They may need English teachers for the training of their Chinese stuffs in English language. You may look for a part time job there.

[Irisher]

Thank you also

[feebie]

Nantong sounds great

Does anyone else have any other suggestions on smaller cities or rural areas?

I would like to live in a rural area in 2009

Can anyone share there experience on the forum of living in smaller cities or towns.

Can anyone recommend any places to work

Need somewhere with health insurance, not unhygienic and

work for someone who does not play mind games.

[Rincewind]

The size of cities in China is quite different from that back in the west. My home town if physically bigger than the city I live in now. However, my home town has just 0.5% of the population of the city I am now in. (No typo there.) This makes for a vastly different style of life. Where I am is big enough to support a good range of restaurant, shops, supermarkets and such while still allowing me to get to the countryside quickly. I could walk from the city center to the outskirts of town in less than half an hour. So although it's a city, it feels like a town.

Another thing to consider is the population distribution of China. In the UK 70% of people live in cities and 30% in rural villages and such. In china this is reversed. Something like 70% of people are rural and 30% urban. So the rural areas are actually quite highly populated compared with European rural areas. You may find some rural settings are not quite a rural as you hoped for.

I did do some teaching about 18 months back, in Inner Mongolia. There, I was in a city that could be strode across in about 15 minutes. The countryside around the town was arid and barren with few people. The town was so insignificant that the almanac of all trivial knowledge (wikipedia) didn't even have an entry about it till I wrote one. I also did a number of trips out to villages nearby. The people didn't speak any English other than the English teachers at the high schools. There were no other westerners anywhere for a hundred miles.

This is still urban life, albeit in a small city, but it is still as city. You also will have to do without just about many conveniences. There were only a small number of restaurants. The major tourist attraction of the area was a single supermarket. Until you got to know people who could take you with them on activities, there was nothing to do. Once you got to know people, they could take you hunting, or horse riding and such.

Teaching is such small cities is radically different to the other places. The people there earn quite low wages. In order to cover the cost of my classes at a private school, there would typically be 60+ students in each class. Foreign teacher class sizes of 100 were seen as normal and I did one class that had in excess of 300 students in attendance. This can be compared with my classes in Anshan where I have 15 children in a class for private school and between 40 to 50 per class for public schools.

[simonlaing]

I taught in a suburb of Suzhou in 200( A tourist small city near shanghai) 1. At that time it was just starting to develop and small farms were seen as often a tall buildings. Since then it has been built up considerably and Suzhou is now basically a suburb of Shanghai with it's own 1 million people.

I wonder if the desire to go rule is not for learning chinese but the pastoral life and scenery.

Suzhou had lots of small walled gardens. But since it was touristy there wasn't much night life a bar street with 5 or 6 small expat bars. Each weekend you could go to a different garden.

You did get to have different experiences. One male teacher took another western teacher and I back to his hometown ate in the farmhouse (complete with the big Mao poster of the door way) walked around the small still used buddhist temple. Drank rice wine it was quite good.

Changhzhou and Wuxi are two other smaller cities where you can get amenities but it is still a dinky little town.

I know people volunteering in poor provinces like Hunan, Gansu and even Ningxia. The trouble with these places is the students sometimes have trouble paying for school supplies let alone multimedia and props that I like to use to make classes exciting. Espicially in the the western provinces if you're not in a big city night life and other western contact will be very restricted.

If you're going for beautiful places to teach in a rural area I suggest Guanxi (Guilin enviorns, beihai,) or Yunan has a bunch of different colleges you could work at.

Traveling in the south is fairly cheap and with tourism you can travel to get western food if you need it. Also the south is much better weather than the north and west which can be bitterly cold. (You will be walking or biking to school) My mongolian students talked of a bitterly cold wind that wouldn't stop blowing all winter.

Though the northeast of China has better rural Putonghua. So for language go there.

have fun,

Simon:)