Anybody here living in China

I was just wondering if there was anybody here who is running some kind of web based business while living in China. Not necessarily Chinese people of course. I'm considering living there myself but I've heard so much about the internet being all blocked off in China that I'm wondering if its really possible to get anything done over there for a webmaster.

 

Hey, my girlfriend is from china, so i lived there for a while. The internet is really bad...well compared to what im used to. A lot of sites are blocked including my own sites. Also, you can only use hosting servers approved by the governemt ehich rules out most servers in the west. The reason for all these restrictions is all internet connections to and from the country are routed through governemt computers, actually lots of website cant be viewed. The good thing tho is there is no IP laws as such so no trouble for distibuting music, movies etc.

 

I live in China right now.

It depends on where you are, and what kind of internet service you have, but it's generally bad.

That being said, you can access anything using Tor or whatever, but it does slow things down quite a bit.

If I were going to move to an Asian country, and was looking for:

1. Good internet access
2. Cheap living prices
3. Quality of life

and so on, I'de probably be thinking about Thailand, the Philippines, or maybe even Cambodia or some place like that.

And I'm not an expert, but I've been in Asia about 8 years. Now in China, a year in South Korea, 4 years in Thailand, and 3 years in India.

India's also not a bad place at all, as far as financial stuff goes, and you can probably get decent internet service, low labor costs, etc., but when I was there the power went out several times a day, and it was kind of a headache.

 

sounds good, ive been thinking about moving to asia permanatly soon, Japan is very good for the internet, and can have 100mbps connection to your house for a lot cheaper than the west

 

Japan is super expensive, though. Prohibitevly so, I would say.

And really - there's nothing in Japan that isn't in any other Asian country.

I remember the last time I was in Osaka . . . Mind you, not even Tokyo, but Osaka . . .

A thin 8oz. type of can of coke in Seoul, SK (one of the worlds most expensive cities) cost about 75 cents. It was more than double that in Japan.

Japan is like the US. In more ways than one. They're printing to much money and making loans at to low of an interest rate to sustain the pace of development and consumption, and one of these days it's all going to peak and bust.

My suggestion on this is to settle in one of the developing or already busted countries.

China is ok. I live in a city called Kunming, which is far, far in the south. Near Myanmar, more or less. There are all the modern amenities here, it's cheap, clean, a good natural environment compared to the sea-side cities and big cities like Beijing of Shanghai, etc. It's a nice place.

I have specific reasons for being in China rather than other places, but if I didn't have them, I would be thinking about places where I could get a cable connection, and where even the possibility of a middle class is so decimated that I could live like a king on $500 a month. . .

Cambodia. Laos. Myanmar if the Junta lighted up a bit . . . .

The other thing I would consider is non-internet business potential . . .

I've often thought about opening up a small agency (a 1 room shop, basically) to process visa applications for the US/UK/Oz.

This wouldn't work so well here, or in Cambodia. You could do it in Thailand or the Phillipines and make a mint of tourists who have met ms. "right" and think they have to get them back home. It's just a matter of having a motorbike courrier, looking respectable enough to make people feel re-assured, and typing in some information into immigration forms that you have in MS Access or something. Easy money . . .

If you only want good Internet - South Korea is the place to be. They're the most broadband wired country in the world (due largely to the fact that the country is 80% mountains, so everybody's packed into the same small areas), they are doing some innovative stuff with search on their own (Naver, etc.) and so on.

Friendly people - Thailand wins hands down.

Get in my tuk tuk, buy my book, have sex with my son - Cambodia. haha

Disney-land like commodification of 5,000 years of culture? Chiner.

All in all, for a nice place to live, I think the best would be Thailand, somewhere outside of BKK. Chiang Mai or something. The worst is South Korea, where they have anti-American protests every week, all white people are automatically Americans, etc. I find it to be a very distasteful place with the most racist and agressive people I've ever seen, and I won't even buy Korean products anymore.

For best internet access, it's S. Korea by a long shot. Lowest on this list is China or Myanmar.

But I like China.

And also - if you're not hell bent on this sort of East Asian thing - I think some cities in India would be a great choice, as well. Bangalore. Chennai. I lived in Jaipur for 3 years, and although it's terribly hot, I thought it was a nice place. It's worth mentioning that I think Indians are generally very friendly, intelligent people, as well. Less brainwashed than the Chinese. More friendly than Koreans. Better English than anywhere else on the continent.

 

Yes, our cities are terribly hot (Rajasthan etc.), terribly cold (Kashmir, Himachel etc.), terribly rainy (Kerala etc..). All climate you can find here. Oooty, Goa, Munnar etc. are nice places...

I think we are open mind...

That is one of our strength...

 

eslsociety : Thank you for the nice post. Didnt knew this stuff till now !

 

Thanks for the responses, very helpful. Well it seems I was right that the internet is really quite bad. Well my wife is Chinese so that would be the country of choice and it would more than likely be Tianjin because that is her home city. Is it not possible to get to these blocked sites by pinging the domain and entering the IPs directly into the URL bar or is it the IPs that are blocked rather than the domains?

Regarding problems with getting government approved hosting, is it not possible to just continue with the hosts I'm using now? I don't see why that would be a problem unless I was unable to access my own cpanel from there..

I have been to Kunming, eslsociety, it is a really beautiful place. Perfect weather too with its year round spring.

 

Yeah, these are all just my own subjective opinions, of course . . .

To be honest - If you're going through a proxy or using Tor or something, and you have a good connection to begin with - China is do-able.

If your wife is Chinese, why don't you think about Taiwan? If she has a visa or is a passport holder for another country, she could probably get in relatively easy.

As far as the hosting stuff goes . . . Yeah I just use hosting wherever. I don't have anything registered in China, because I wouldn't want to deal with it. I do have a bank account here, and I've had them in S. Korea, Thailand and India, just for cashing adsense checks and what not.

I teach 1-2 classes every morning (no more than 3 hours a day) at a college here, get a free apartment, free internet, etc. as well as the visa of course, and make about US$900 a month. I make at least that much online, and it's a very easy life.

The last job that I had in the USA was working in the prosecutors office as a paralegal, and I certainly never lived as well there as I do in these other countries. I have no intention of going back, either.

 

Man don't mention Taiwan! You definitely said the wrong thing there...Anyway, how come you get free internet?

 

Haha

I walk around blabbering about Taiwan, Tibet, Falun Gong, the gap between the big cities and rural areas, the internet censorship, the lack of elections, the trash chickens and whatever other whim overtakes me, and it just gets written off as "foreign" eccentricism.

My college provides the internet. And the computer. It's 100mbps connection, does the job. Free internet, free posh apartment, dirt cheap food, a salary at about 4x the national average for local university professors for 1/4 of the work + internet income, learning Mandarin, etc. . .

It ain't bad.

 

Sounds great. So you spend a lot of time with tor or whatever and since your connection is fast its not too bad. Looks like from your website there you might be learning Kung Fu too. Having tasted the food in Kunming I'd have to add that its not just dirt cheap, its the best food I ever tasted too. Although you have to know what to order which might require aid from a local.

Well we have some connections in China so we might be able to get some good deals on things similar to yourself.

 

Wow, That is how much you are supposed to make in the US here, just to live!

to live comfortably, you should be making around $120,000 /year.

 

haha,I'm a Chinese live in Yiwu,Zhejiang,about 300 miles from Shanghai.
Yiwu is the biggest commodity Market,and has 10 thousand foreigner live in Yiwu.They all business man,and sourcing products on Yiwu markets and shipping to world wide.every day about 1500 containers leave Yiwu.
Yiwu's products means cheap,means everywhere!

It's a good place for you to strat you own business,and the risk is very low.

The only thing I hate is the Net,so many IPs were blocked.....
and my poorly english..
Now Chinese Gov. had start english courses at grade school,but it was late for me......

 

my sites are ok so far in china

 

Well at least DP isn't blocked for you guys. Do China block websites by the domain name or IP?

 

Both...!
and many IP segment was blocked....
I always had to use proxy to visit it ..

 

so much about the internet being all blocked off in China . it is true, some website you must open with proxy

 

Hello, there are many VPNs like Astrill, PsiPhone,.. Some of them are for free, for some of them you need to pay.