Year of The Pig

  It's the Chinese New Year and there seems to be a flurry of articles and blog posts about what it's like to be an American working in China.

Geoffrey Fowler of The Wall Street Journal(subscription required) has a great article about the Chinese working culture,

"I was riding the elevator a few weeks ago with a Chinese colleague here in the Journal's Asian headquarters. I smiled and said, "Hi." She responded, "You've gained weight." I might have been appalled, but at least three other Chinese co-workers also have told me I'm fat. I probably should cut back on the pork dumplings. In China, such an intimate observation from a colleague isn't necessarily an insult. It's probably just friendliness."

Fowler reports that many offices have a tea lady who constantly makes teas and heats up lunches for employees. Fowler describes this job as being like an office nanny. And, while American women may wear their tennis shoes to work and then change into their designer shoes for the office. Chinese women do the exact opposite -- wearing their stilettos on the street and slipping into slippers in the office.

While many of us have the impression that working conditions in China are abysmal, for at least one industry the working conditions in China are an improvement over life in the USA.

Dvorak Uncensored has a post about a game programmer who has opted to move to China to gain some work-life balance.

"He soon learned that China has laws in place that make such work conditions as he was enduring at home illegal. Work days there can be no longer than 11 hours, and employees are only legally allowed to work 36 hours of overtime a month. “There are places in the US games industry where the base work week is 50 hours and that doesn’t even start to account for the extended periods of ‘crunch time”, he says. “In China, you couldn’t legally run a shop that way. And heck, who wants to live their lives that way?”

Some of the work perks include:

“We will have an onsite chef for breakfast, lunch and dinner”, he boasts. Massages, dry cleaning, company supplied drivers, language and cultural tutoring (English or Chinese), haircuts, fitness memberships, car washing and maid and grocery services are just some of the other perks Balanced Worlds have in store for their development staff".

While Americans may be moving to China for the shorter work week, young Chinese  say they are working to shop.