Teaching in China – How a Chinese agent almost made me bankrupt.
I came to China in November, 2003 to teach English. I had never been a schoolteacher before and had no knowledge of Chinese. Over the previous three or four years I had wondered about teaching somewhere in Asia but the doors seemed to be closed because I was over forty. Japan, Korea and Taiwan, the countries I was drawn towards because their developed economies offered the possibility of earning enough to save some money for further travel, were not usually prepared to accept anyone over forty (and definitely no one over fifty) unless they had a track record of teaching in a different culture. One day I was surprised to see an advertisement in a newspaper recruiting teachers for China and saying that age was no barrier. There were factors in my life which were making it difficult for me to gain employment at a reasonable income level in Australia and I had always wanted to travel, but didn’t have the money, so I decided to follow this lead. To my surprise the opportunity was real. I carefully queried the wages and was told I could earn 3,500RMB a month teaching in a school and would easily find enough private teaching jobs in the community to earn the same in far fewer hours through private teaching. The teaching hours were light so there would be plenty of time to do private work. It was obvious I would be able to send money back to pay out my overloaded credit cards and also live comfortably in China.
The ad was placed by an Australian working for a Chinese Agency that placed foreign English teachers in schools in Hubei province in the central Yangtze (Chang Jiang) plain. He himself worked in Wuhan, the provincial capital and was raking money in through doing private work at high prices. I thought I was going to Wuhan until close to my departure date but was placed ‘near ‘ Wuhan (a few hundred kilometres away) in Xiangfan, another industrial city in the province. The school I worked in was owned by the Railways as the town is a key railroad junction and maintenance point. I was given the contract and to my dismay I saw a clause that specified I could not work other than for the school without their permission. My agent and her Aussie agent assured me that I needn’t worry about it and in fact most schools don’t enforce this government mandated clause. Should I blame my luck for putting me in a school that was different? Maybe I needed to learn a lesson about spending money before I had it. I was continually receiving requests from people I met to do private teaching. This school refused to budge on the clause and falsely claimed that they were not allowed to let me teach anyone other than their students and only according to the contract.
By the end of the contract I just could not pay my debts and had received several nasty letters from two financial institutions. Explaining the situation I had got into made no difference. My fifty years without a blemish on my credit record made no difference. I completed my year in Xiangfan and I must say that in every other respect they treated me fairly. There was another grumble about housing but it was minor until I met a lovely lady who used to visit me in my room in the area of the boys’ dormitories. When the school complained I pointed out that they had specified the type of accommodation I would have but not provided it. They had even built a separate building with foreign teacher funding but not furnished the new rooms. They accepted they had caused the situation and denying me the freedom to have a romance was not correct, so there were no more complaints about that. Through such polite debate any difficulties that came up were resolved. I was straightforward about having my rights in the contract followed to the letter if they wanted to exercise their right to prevent me working elsewhere, so I did not have the same difficulties that some foreigners experience when schools ‘stretch’ the contract and in the end I believe we parted with goodwill.
By the time I left I had negotiated a better contract and although at first it was clear that the new school was playing with technicalities and did not intend to pay what they promised I did receive enough money to send sums to Australia to reduce my debts. See my posting on respect. My ex-wife was wonderful and did what she could to keep some money flowing into the account. In the end I won a paper war with an insurance company over a health incident and was able to pay off my credit card debts.
The moral of the story is, if you want to teach in China be aware that most Chinese business people will try to cheat you in some way, by twisting words in a contract, by making false promises, or by asking you to do work that is not in the contract, so be very wary and tie up as much as you can. Even a contract means very little in the real world of China but if you are pleasant and polite but firm you will win favour and have no real difficulties. Do them a favour when you can and they will treat you very well.