Posts Tagged ‘sarah peel’

I sunk into a good Twitter exchange yesterday with my friend @GE_Anderson about the nature of the expat community in China. Two tweets — here and here –  are the inspirations for this morning’s post.

To summarize, and according to his long experience, Greg claims that there are only two sorts of (Old) China Hands who spend time in the PRC:

1) Those in search of the next big wave, jumping from nation to nation in search of the next best opportunity — business or otherwise. Expats like this can land basically anywhere, and you might just as well see them in China as you would in Vietnam (another new expatriate haunt). Like osmosis, they’ll constantly shift around wherever the money is, from low to high concentrations, and are usually the very same people who are the butt of most foreigner jokes, disproportionately contributing to the negative stereotypes about foreigners in the places they find themselves.

Versus…

2) Expats like himself — people in the academic community with study (read: doctoral) commitments and foreigners with their various long-term business plans — who withstand the vicissitudes of the market’s flows and the society’s upheavals, hanging around for inordinately long periods of time when most mere mortals head for the hills following a crisis. True experts in their craft by any other name, if you ask me.

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