Job Discussion Forums

[John2018]

I'm considering an offer at a public university in Zhengzhou.

14k/month for max 16 teaching hours/week, 4 weeks paid for spring festival, but no other benefits/bonuses, no housing allowance and no flight reimbursement.
I find the lack of flight reimbursement odd... but according to my calculations it should work out to roughly 11k/month in my account if I deduct accommodation and flight from the 14k.

Sounds like an okay offer to me. (what do you guys think?)

I have a few concerns, one is the air quality in Zhengzhou, another is that I have not been able to get contact info for any current or former teachers.

The offer is through a Western agent who has been a pleasure to deal with so far, and I have not done any negotiating yet.

Thoughts?

[The bear]

[nimadecaomei]

Here in Jiangsu housing allowance and flight are both taxable unless you have the tax receipt (meaning tax was paid somewhere). For housing, this means the landlord has to be willing to pay tax on the rent money (they usually do not want to) or an agent needs to sort it out for you (for a cost, but less than what would be taxed). For flight, this means the ticket receipts (so if you don't go anywhere you need to get receipts from somewhere else).

[John2018]

[Modernist]

The biggest problem with it is being in Henan, in my opinion. Aside from pollution, which is quite atrocious, Zhengzhou is a dull, ugly, sprawling mess of a city with little to nothing of interest. Outside Zhengzhou, the best you can say about Henan is that the people are friendly (because they are discriminated against by all other Chinese, so it's pretty much their only choice), it's cheap (because it has to be, no one wants to live there) and it's pretty difficult to get fired from a job there no matter what you do (again, they are so desperate for teachers that this is a necessity).

The 'higher' pay is likely due to the Henan penalty. They can't get teachers, so this is a vaguely creative way to grab attention from people like you, without the school necessarily having to pay much more in total. The question is, why do you want to work in one of the worst parts of China for what is, in the end, a fairly mediocre total offer? Not that it's awful, I agree that it's basically average.

But for average, why not go to a better province than Henan? There's quite a lot of better places. All the coastal provinces are better, for example. If you will tolerate the air in Henan, just get a job around Beijing and make more money and have better culture/food/shopping/transportation/etc. Shandong has better air as well, although it's still north. The three Dongbei provinces are all nicer than Henan. Basically, everywhere is better than Henan.

[John2018]