Job Discussion Forums

[Dilton]

So, all told, what would you and your CT girlfriend consider to be a typical pay package for a CT in a public school? Salary, bonuses, extras ...

[Silent Shadow]

[Trinley]

I can believe that. But since the majority of FTs in China seem to stay for around a year, sometimes even less, we can't really expect those benefits to apply to us. Sure there are a few FTs who have kept the same China job for 5 or 10 years, but for every one of those there must be another 100 FTs who are like 22 years old, just got out of college, and want to live abroad for a year. Pension, retirement, loans and motor vehicles hardly apply to the majority of FTs, so I find it useless to compare in that way or to feel that we are getting the short end of the stick somehow. If you've been there for 10 years, I do see how you would be miffed at not getting any long-term benefits. I agree with you there.

It's interesting to hear what benefits CTs get and all, and I'm not trying to be argumentative, but I find it surprising when FTs in China talk like they're getting a raw deal. I don't get it. I worked so little and had money coming out of my ears in China.

[MisterButtkins]

[wangdaning]

[Lobster]

Of course most of us have no accurate idea of what Chinese people earn, but given the way things work here it is likely more than what appears on the books. Most CT i know all have new cars and nice apartments, and they're not buying those on 27k rmb per year. I do believe that they receive substantial subsidies and bonuses. Hiding income here is a long-established practice.

RED

[Silent Shadow]

[MisterButtkins]

You guys must be working at really high end schools or something. I've never met a Chinese English teacher who owned a car, other than like the English department vice president. Some of the engineering professors at my last school had cars, but these were guys who had PhDs, had studied internationally, had published papers, etc. Not normal teachers.

Also, if being an English teacher is so lucrative then why do all my English major students want to work as businessmen or tour guides? Just today one of my students was saying that she wanted to be a tour guide because the money was better than teaching.

[7969]

Most English teachers, at least where I work are married women. If there is a car in the family, or a nice home, it's probably got less to do with that English teacher and more to do with her husband who is likely not a teacher and undoubtedly has a higher salary than his wife. I also note that the ones who do seem to have cars (of any make or model, not many Audis, BMWs or Mercedes that everyone else claims to be seeing to be found in our parking lot) are in their late 30s, 40s, or older. The only teacher (and he's the IT guy, not an english teacher) in our department that I know of who is under 30 that has a car comes from a wealthy family (his dad bought him the car). Everyone else is on motorbikes. or taking the bus.

[Lobster]

[bobdaun]

My two cents worth :

Yes, 4500 a month is not a lot of money, even for a university job which normally requires you to be on site for fewer than half the number of hours than a private school would.

When I first started out with teaching in China in 2004, the going wage for a uni job then was about 4000 per month.

Most now pay around 5000-6000 plus benefits, although there are plenty of universities out there which obviously think that it is still 2003 (check out the Beijing Language and Culture University's recruitment page: http://www.blcu.edu.cn/blcuweb/english/jobs.asp#EnglishDepartment 3700 RMB per month for English teachers, with the possibility of earning up to 4800 RMB per month if you can teach financial management or marketing in the International Business School and you have a PhD ).

On the other hand, there is a lot of nonsense talked about the cost of living in China and the conditions for foreign teachers here, as well as a certain amount of paranoia when comparing foreign teachers' conditions with those of locals.

My total annual take home from my current university job is around 95,000 per year, including bonuses which are handed out at the end of each semester according to performance.

The foreign teachers do earn more than the Chinese teachers. I know this because, as one of the senior teachers here I am involved in the recruitment process for both foreign teachers and Chinese teachers, as well as making their contracts, so I know exactly what they get paid.

Both Chinese teachers and foreign teachers get paid bonuses as I mentioned. However, they are nothing like the sums which were mentioned by earlier posters, they tend to be the equivalent of a month's ordinary wages.

Yes, there are people in senior university posts, usually either professors, deans, or senior administrators, who make a lot of money and who roll around in huge cars. This is also true in Western universities - in the States it is not unheard of for presidents of large colleges to have compensation packages of over $1,000,000 per annum.

However, in China as in the West, the vast majority are much more modestly compensated. For example, my boss does not own his own apartment and he comes to work every day on the bus as he doesn't own a car.

When I arrived in my present job I was given a 2 bedroom modern apartment, 90 square meters, furnished, with all utilities bills paid. The building is not reserved for foreign teachers only - lots of local teachers choose to live there too as the apartments are nice and the area is very pretty. However, they have to pay rent and utilities themselves.

I have heard the complaints about lack of pensions and other benefits for foreign teachers before, in fact I was once in a faculty meeting where a couple of other FTs went off on a long tirade about this. Yes, it is a shame that we don't get a pension fund. Yes, I am making private provisions for my old age, not just trusting to luck. However, the fact that most FTs here do not get a pension does not mean that we are all being badly treated and exploited.

For starters, very few of the FTs will stay in one place for more than a couple of years (incidentally, neither of the people who went off on the pensions tirade stayed with the college). The schools know this, and so there is very little incentive for them to go to the trouble and expense of setting up and administering pension schemes for the thousands of transient workers who pass through their doors over the years.

Is that completely fair? No. Is it understandable? Yes.

Comparing the situation with what a lot of Western governments do, the difference is really not that great. I spent a couple of years working in Europe before I came to China, and of course I paid tax during that time. However, I hold out no great hopes that in 30 years time the government of that country is going to have my paperwork to hand and track me down in order to pay me the pension of 50 bucks month to which I might theoretically be entitled. I am equally sure that if I tried to chase them up for it then I would not have a snowball's chance in the Sahara of actually squeezing any money out of them. I speak from experience here - the same thing happened to my father, who worked for some years in Europe, paid his taxes, and when he retired and applied for the pension to which he was entitled from that country was informed that they couldn't find his paperwork.

Or think about the situation back in the US. With all the furious debate going on about public spending, social security, welfare, medicare, etc., how do you think people would respond to a small group of foreign non-citizens who started complaining about the lack of pension and welfare rights afforded to relatively unqualified itinerant foreign workers who stayed in the US for a couple of years, never bothered to learn the language, and then went home? I'm imagining that such complaints would not be universally warmly received.

It is easy to complain about the lot of foreign teachers here, and many do get a truly awful deal and shabby treatment. However, many people also have unrealistic expectations and lack a realistic understanding of their status.

An awful lot of foreign teachers who come here are not really teachers at all. They don't have any real qualifications (a 120 hour TEFL certificate does not count as a teaching "qualification"). They are simply here to enjoy a lifestyle and an amount of personal freedom which they couldn't enjoy back in their home countries.

There is absolutely nothing wrong with this - it is a perfectly worthy personal lifestyle choice.

On the other hand, if you make such a lifestyle choice, in the pursuit of which you are doing a job for which you are less than fully qualified, it makes you seem ridiculous when you complain about not being treated as a professional.

As an example, I was recently interviewing teachers for a new position we had. One candidate, who had a good degree from a respected university in the States, told me in all seriousness "I'm not too good on grammar and stuff, I don't really know too much about all that."

If you were applying for a job as an accountant but you "aren't really too good at math and don't really know too much about numbers and all that", would you really expect to get a job?

I had a long list of resumes from candidates, all university graduates of course, who had absolutely no formal teacher training or serious language teaching experience, but who somehow felt that because they were native speakers this adequately qualified them for the job.

If some tech company back in the States were recruiting designers and programmers for a cellphone project, would you apply for the job, despite having no knowledge of programming or industrial design, based on the fact that, y'know, I really like cell phones and I use mine a lot, so I think I'd probably be real good at the job?

At the same time I got applications from several other teachers who had been here for years, but who spoke absolutely no Chinese.

I mean, seriously, how am I going to tell the students "this person is a language learning expert" if they haven't even managed to learn the language of the country in which they are actually living?

These issues cut to the heart of the real situation of most FTs here in China and their relationships to the schools they work for.

Most foreign teachers are relatively under qualified for the jobs which they hold. Most Chinese university teachers need at least a Master's degree in English language teaching or a related field before they can hope to get even an entry-level university job. Most foreign teachers have a bachelor�s degree in an unrelated subject and little or no formal training in applied linguistics, SLA theory, didactic methodology etc.

Universities know that most of their Chinese teachers will stay for a sizable chunk of their career at that university. Stable jobs are not easy to come by even for university graduates (one of my former students with whom I keep in contact just got a job, after 5 months of looking, which pays 1800 RMB per month). As a result, they know they can rely on their Chinese teachers, and there is a fairly symbiotic relationship - the school looks after the teachers, with paid holiday, health insurance, pensions, cheap housing, job security, etc., in return for which the teachers put in extra effort for the school, doing odd jobs, taking on other responsibilities if the need arises, etc.

Compare this with the majority of foreign teachers. They are not going to stay at the school, and the school knows this. They feel no loyalty to the school and the school feels no responsibility in return. Most foreign teachers are absolutely adamant that they will do absolutely no more than their contract specifies, out of a quite understandable fear of being abused, but this in turn translates into an equally understandable reputation as work-shy clock watchers who only care about their pay packets.

Of course, many FTs are not really like this. On the other hand, not all schools are out to ruthlessly screw over their FTs. However, taking all of the above into consideration, it is not surprising that there is so frequently such a lot of suspicion, resentment and friction in the relationship between teachers and schools.

Language is another important issue. Relatively few foreign teachers make any serious effort to become fluent in Chinese, which has a variety of negative effects.

Firstly, it appears arrogant and impolite to the Chinese. After all, when foreigners come to most western countries to live and work there are language tests as a precondition for this, and comments sections of newspapers back home are full of complaints about foreigners who come to live in our country but make no attempt to adapt to the society or culture. It is unsurprising if at least some Chinese people feel the same about some westerners.

Secondly, the inability to communicate in the local language can produce an unfortunate sort of bunker mentality among many foreigners. They don't really understand what is going on so they end up in a sort of permanent state of siege, forever on guard and assuming that they are going to be ripped off, cheated and exploited. Again, this rarely translates into happy, comfortable relationships between employers and employees.

Of course, there is a huge difference in all of this between government universities and private training "schools".

Private language schools are businesses - they are fundamentally interested in making money, not in educating people. I worked for one of the largest chains for a while and saw this quite clearly. Regardless of whether or not students made any progress, they were always passed on to the next level because that meant that they were happy and kept paying. Of course, the fact that you had students in the "Advanced" classes who could not use the past simple tense was irrelevant - the business was flourishing.

The owners of these schools are quite happy to take in under-qualified teachers so long as they have attractive foreign faces - it all helps in recruiting students. However, in this situation FTs complaining that they are not taken seriously as teachers seems odd - they are not employed for their educational prowess, but rather for their commercial worth.

Complaining about the fact that the boss drives a big car while you are only earning 10,000 RMB per month also seems odd. Steve Jobs is worth billions but I'm sure that when Apple stock rises he doesn't feel the need to share his good fortune with every production line worker and junior programmer he has working for him. They are paid to do a job. He is the boss of the company. Whether or not he is a nice guy is irrelevant. Whether or not it is fair that the owner of the company is enormously more wealthy than the people who actually do all of the work is also irrelevant. That is simply the way things are. It is not a special feature of China. It is not a special feature of language schools. The fact that under-qualified FTs make far less money than the school owners does not mean that they are being discriminated against, it is simply a feature of modern capitalist society everywhere. If they are being treated unfairly, well, so is pretty much every ordinary wage earner everywhere on the planet.

Off course, there are many, many disadvantages to being an FT here in China. However, before complaining too vocally or too bitterly about them, we should pause for a moment and think about why we are here, how we got here, and what we would be doing if we weren't here.

A large number of FTs are not professional teachers. They have teaching positions here not as the fruit of many years of studying language learning theory and methodology, but simply because they are native speakers of English. This is not a bad thing - quite the contrary, it is a stupendous piece of good fortune that you can make a living just by turning up somewhere and talking your native language, without the need for extensive and expensive formal training. Rejoice in that good fortune.

Many teachers are here because they don't want to live with the soul-destroying grind of a 9-5 office job back home, but prefer to have a much more relaxed lifestyle living abroad.

Again, great. But if this is the main motivation, then please don't lose sight of it, otherwise you will also lose your sense of proportion. Thousands of FTs are able to have quite comfortable life-style here working part time doing a job for which they are not qualified. Where else could you do this? Back home? How many of us could afford to live on our own without roommates, take taxis and eat out every day while only working 20 hours per week in our home towns? Probably very few.

In view of this, complaining about rising prices and stagnant wages is unrealistic.

Yes, prices are rising, not only in China, but everywhere around the world. Yes, wages are not rising in line with prices, again, not just in China but everywhere around the world. The average middle-class American family makes less money in real terms today than they did at the beginning of the 90s. This is not part of some vast conspiracy to defraud and reduce to penury all the hard working FTs in China, this is just the state of the world economy.

When I first came to China I had several friends who worked in Beijing for large foreign companies and received very generous living subsidies, housing, education for their kids, etc. 10 years ago being sent to Beijing was considered a hardship posting and had to be compensated accordingly. After years of development this is no longer true, and so the market and compensation packages reflect this.

10 years ago China was considered extremely underdeveloped. As a result, there were few foreigners who came here to live and work as teachers. Today China is no longer so far off the beaten track and correspondingly a far larger number of people come here hoping to make a living teaching.

As a result, schools are no longer obliged to offer compensation packages which are so far above what is the norm for local people in order to attract the foreigners. This is not the result of some vast conspiracy to grind the hated foreigner under their heels, it is just the result of simple market forces.

Being a foreign teacher is a relatively comfortable way of life - you can easily make a living wage for relatively little work for which little special training is required.

Of course, some jobs are better than others and you should always shop around to find the best offer - I would not recommend my worst enemy to accept the offer which I posted above from BLCU, which is so far below the market rate as to be completely ridiculous.

However, we also have to recognize that perhaps the boom time for EFL in China is peaking, or has already peaked. As the country develops more, more foreigners come here, standards for university jobs become more stringent, benefits for training school jobs become less generous. Market forces.

This is not just a result of more foreigners being drawn here by China's development. 10 or 15 years ago as China's foreign trade was taking off and there was a shortage of really competent English speakers to work in this sector, English language skills were seen as an automatic passport to a good job and a better life. Now there are millions more university graduates than there were at that time and there are millions more reasonably competent English speakers than there were 10 years ago, but the number of jobs for them has not expanded correspondingly. As a result, English language skills are no longer seen as the automatic passport to a good job and a better life which they once were. This means that people are no longer willing to pay as much for classes, and the competition from the proliferation of English schools means that they no longer have to.

This is just the result of economics. Complaining about it is a bit like western factory workers in the 80s and 90s complaining about the disappearance of their well-salaried and benefited jobs in heavy industry. Them losing those jobs and benefits wasn't the result of some deep conspiracy to screw them over, it was just that the market had changed and it was no longer possible or desirable to sustain the old model.

The same may be true of ESL in China over the coming years.

If you come to China with realistic expectations, you will probably have a good time. I spend around 3500 RMB per month, which includes local travel, eating out, and shopping in western supermarkets for olive oil, cheese, Dr. Pepper etc. as well as the local fruit and vegetable markets. Having said that, I do a lot of cooking at home, and I enjoy Chinese food, so when I eat out I don�t just eat at western restaurants. I don�t live opulently, but neither do I live like a hermit. This means that I manage to save a considerable amount of money every year for international travel, something which would most emphatically not be true if I were working at a similar job back home.

On the other hand, if you come here expecting to be able to party endlessly and live like a prince while working part-time at a job for which you have no real qualifications, then you are going to be disappointed and may well end up becoming bitter and resentful.

So basically, everything depends on your view. If you are well qualified, experienced, speak Chinese fluently, work hard, network, show that you are willing to cooperate and that you are here for a while, not just backpacking through, then there are still very good jobs to be had in China. However, these jobs are the payoff for a lot of time and effort invested, they very rarely fall into your lap. ESL, like every other industry, does not owe anybody a living, but if you choose wisely and work smart then it can still offer a much better life than any comparable job which might be available back home.

[7969]

When I first saw that post by bobdaun, I thought who is this windbag and what's he going on about? Then I read the post in entirety. Aside from probably being the longest non-cut and paste post in the history of this forum (it's a thread all on it's own I think) it's one of the best written and most accurate posts that goes a long way to dispelling a number of myths that appear regularly on this forum. I need to read it a few more times before I comment further. Thanks for a great post bob.

[bobdaun]

awww, shucks
thanks

[dean_a_jones]

Agreed, this is an excellent post which gives a pretty clear picture of what it means to be an FT in China at this point in time (with some idea of how things have developed over time).

If you are new to China, about to arrive, or thinking of coming, it should give you a good idea of what you are getting yourself into (both the good and the bad). The points about maintaining realistic goals and expectations are absolutely true. The ability to understand and cope with the reality of life here and what that means for you on almost every level (work, relationships, money, health, community etc.) will often make or break your experience here (as well as your good humour and spirit). One's willingness to adjust, compromise and adapt (when its fair to do so) is key--it is important in life wherever you are, but here it really can make the difference.

If you have been here for a while then you should recognise most of what is being said here. If you have been around for a bit and disagree with most of the content of the post, then I imagine you might be having quite a hard time.

Thanks for sharing it.

[Lobster]

Yes, an all-around excellent post. Maybe I'd take exception to (pardon me while I digress):