China got cool for foreigners. But can they find a job there?

SINGAPORE – When Shanghai-based recruiter Miriam Wickertsheim woke up one humid morning in July, she was shocked to find more than a hundred messages on her phone from people all over the world asking her about jobs in China.

The general manager of DirectHR, which mainly recruits European executives for China-based companies, had already seen inquiries about working in China steadily increase over the past year to about 40 a day, but this was the most that she had received in a day.

The latest uptick was different not only in scale, Wickertsheim said, but also in who was reaching out. Instead of mid- to senior-level executives who wanted a China experience under their belt, the messages came from recent graduates, technicians, a carpenter, teachers and people with Chinese spouses, among others.

“China got cool. That is an oversimplified way of saying it, but I think that is what is happening,” said Wickertsheim, a German native.

She pointed to online fascination with the country’s robots, electric vehicles (EVs) and artificial intelligence, as well as the social-media trend known as “Chinamaxxing”, combining an internet slang “maxxing”, which means “to go all in”, with China or Chinese-related things such as fashion, technology and travel.

The interest comes as China is subjecting visa applications and supporting documents to closer scrutiny under new exit and entry regulations that came into force from Sept 15, adding a hurdle for foreigners hoping to satisfy their curiosity about the country through a job there.

China has long attracted foreign workers and visitors. In the decades of rapid growth following its 2001 entry into the World Trade Organisation, it became a particularly appealing destination for expatriates looking to advance their careers by adding China work experience to their resumes, recruiters said.

Foreign entries and exits peaked at 98 million trips in 2019, before collapsing during the Covid-19 pandemic as China sharply restricted international travel. They have since rebounded, reaching 65 million trips in 2024 and 82 million in 2025.

But the increased interest to find work in China is colliding with fundamental shifts in China’s labour market, amid a slowing economy, depressed wages and high youth unemployment.

The number of foreign candidates looking for China-based jobs has nearly doubled since the end of the Covid-19 pandemic in 2023, said Tim Ye, chief executive of recruitment platform HiredChina.

Yet the stronger trend is not foreigners relocating to China, but foreigners seeking work with Chinese companies as those firms expand overseas.

Interest in Chinese employers across jobs both in China and abroad has increased at least fivefold based on impressions on HiredChina job posts, with the strongest growth coming from South-east Asia, followed by the US and then Europe, Ye said in an interview with The Straits Times.

At the same time, Chinese employers are more interested in hiring foreigners for their overseas branches than their China ones.

“The sharpest rise in demand is for foreign talent hired locally by Chinese companies overseas,” Ye said. “The proportion of foreigners coming to work in China has not surged at the same pace, although it has gradually increased.”

As Chinese manufacturers and technology firms expand abroad, they need people who understand overseas customers and markets, according to Hong Kong-based Ye. Consumer electronics, intelligent manufacturing, green energy, EVs, solar technology and batteries are among the sectors creating such demand, he added.

A less abstract China

This push abroad is taking place against a backdrop of improving perceptions of China internationally.

A survey by US think-tank Pew Research Center of more than 42,000 people in 36 countries published in July showed that China was viewed more favourably than the United States globally for the first time since at least 2023. In 20 countries with comparable data, nearly half held a positive view of China, compared with 36 per cent for the US. The shift included allies such as Canada, Australia, France and Germany.

Younger respondents in most countries surveyed by Pew also tended to view China more positively than older people.

Especially among younger people, the appeal of the “Chinamaxxing” meme may rest on tangible changes rather than just online novelty, said Lizzi C. Lee, a Washington-based fellow on the Chinese economy at the Asia Society Policy Institute.

As China becomes more visible in everyday life, it is also becoming less abstract.

“For a long time, China’s rise was discussed in fairly abstract terms – authoritarian resilience, the world’s factory and so on. Now, younger people are actually experiencing Chinese modernity in everyday life, either through social media or directly, especially in the Global South,” Lee told The Straits Times. “EVs, apps like RedNote and boba tea chains are making China less abstract.”

She added that the trend also reflects dissatisfaction closer to home, particularly among young Americans who see China’s visible urban development through the lens of their own economic pressures.

“A lot of Chinamaxxing is really asking: ‘Why can they build this and we can’t?’” Lee said, citing examples such as social media posts hyping up images of China’s “shiny metros” and massive infrastructure projects.

But the China admired online is not necessarily a China that can offer a lot of jobs to foreigners.

With domestic job seekers facing a tight labour market, exacerbated by a record 12.7 million university graduates entering the workforce in 2026, options for foreigners are increasingly narrow.

Even teaching English, once the most obvious way for young foreigners to enter China, offers fewer easy openings.

Omeida Language College, a private school in the southern tourist town of Yangshuo that teaches English to local students, employs seven foreign teachers and is largely fully staffed, said its founder Ou Da. Vacancies tend to arise when teachers leave, rather than through expansion.

“Yes, more and more foreigners want to come to work in China,” said Ou, who started his language school in 2001. “We can see they want to get a job, but the economy is not that good, not too many jobs are available. That’s the problem.”

Ou said Yangshuo once had about 16 foreign language schools, primarily focused on teaching English, at the peak in 2019. Now, he estimated that only five or six remained licensed and few were operating fully.

He attributed the contraction to the pandemic and China’s “Double Reduction” policy, which has curbed off-campus academic tutoring for school-age children. Omeida has survived partly because it focuses on adult education, he said.

Omeida requires prospective foreign English teachers to hold a bachelor’s degree, have at least two years of teaching experience and provide a clean criminal record before they can be hired to teach the school’s roughly 100 Chinese students. “They have a deep understanding of their own culture. That is the part you cannot easily replace,” Ou said.

Interest versus reality

Even as opportunities narrow for many ordinary job seekers, China is stepping up efforts to lure highly skilled overseas talent in strategic fields such as AI and other technology. Shanghai’s 2026 Magnolia Talent Programme offers up to 300,000 yuan (S$57,000) in individual funding for eligible overseas researchers to move to the city, while Chinese tech firms have dangled annual pay packages of up to $200,000 to Singapore-trained AI graduates.

But getting hired is only one part of building a life in China. For many foreigners, the greater test begins after arrival: whether a first job can develop into a stable career, and whether the practical systems around it can accommodate a family and a long-term future.

Mengwei Tu, a senior lecturer in sociology at Swansea University who has studied international students and foreign professionals in China, said rising interest should not be confused with China becoming an easy long-term destination.

“‘Interest’ is a good word because it means people are beginning to think about it and feel attracted to it,” she said. “But there can be a long gap between interest and reality.”

In Tu’s research, foreign professionals and graduates struggled to turn an initial opportunity in China into a stable career and family life. The obstacles were often mundane: obtaining longer-term contracts, arranging children’s education, and navigating banking, healthcare and public services designed around Chinese identity documents and domestic digital systems.

“China is very good at physical infrastructure: public transport, buildings and so on. But the social infrastructure needed for foreigners to remain long term is not there,” she said. “I would hesitate to call China a new destination for global talent -- I would probably call it a transit point for global talent.”