The total number of expatriates currently living in China reached over half a million in 2010. Expatriates China's new open-door policy and spectacular growth over the past three decades has prompted droves of westerners to make the leap to the Middle Kingdom. can be seen in nearly every provincial city in China, Shanghai and Beijing of course hosting most of them.
Living in China for expatriates today living standard in China & # 39; s largest cities like Beijing, Guangzhou and Shanghai is as enjoyable as that of the western cities like New York, London and Paris.
Some expats find Chinese culture confusing, most consider it fascinating. Most opportunities are all positive factors that attract more and more expatriates to come live, work and travel in China.
Then there are those who have become celebrities in their own technology, education and finance sectors. There are many expatriates who earn a living by opening their own western style restaurants and bars. rights, either from capitalizing on their western face for television, by blogging about current events, or publishing memoirs of their adventures.
And most respected expats living there today, and how they found they respect fortunes and / or fame and / or infamy.
1) David "China Bounder" Marriott
Using the alias "China Bounder," Marriott sparked out among the men of Shanghai in his blog, Chinabounder described in juicy details how he seduced multiple Chinese girls most of what were his former students. The online campaign drew over 17,000 visitors and Marriot was threatened with murder and conviction by conservative Chinese claiming he had blackened their country 's good name. He was wast to be an English teacher in his thirties, his cover was never completely blown. Now he has decided to reveal his identity in a public trial his new book, Fault Lines on the Face of China: 50 Reasons Why China May Never Be Great.
2) Mark "Dashan" Rowswell
Dashan is the Chinese stage name adopted by Canadian Mark Henry Rowswell, who works as a freelance performer in People 's Republic of China. Relatively unknown in the West, Dashan is perhaps the most famous Western personality in China & # 39; s media He also spoke Cantonese in a Ford Commercial targeted at North American Chinese consumers. He occupations a unique position as a foreign national person has become a bona fide domestic celebrity.
3) Richard Burger
Richard Burger is the Peking Duck, which has been published since 2002. The Peking Duck & # 39; s posts on hot-button issues generate energetic comment threads from all sides of the political spectrum, and the site used to be Burger recently became an editor at the newly launched English edition of the Global Times, a Chinese newspaper that has a reputation for leftist, nationalist content.
4 Peter Hessler
Peter Hessler is best known for his two books on China: River Town: Two Years on the Yangtze, a Kiriyama Prize-winning book about his experiences in two years as a Peace Corps volunteer teaching English in China, and Oracle Bones: A Journey Between While 's a living in Beijing. While his stories are ostensibly about ordinary people & # 39; s lives in China and are not motivated by politics, they ignoreless touch upon political issues or the lives of people who encountered problems during the Cultural Revolution.
5) Dominic Johnson-Hill
Dominic Johnson - Hill is a former backpacker from the UK who now runs Plastered T - shirts, the startup he founded in 2005 which is about $ 800,000 a year in sales. When Dominic first arrived in China, he had little to his name - but a passionate love for China got him plenty of media attention. And he made the most of each press opportunity, such as appearing on a popular Chinese TV show wearing a t - shirt that featured his shop & # 39; s phone number. Plasticed & # 39; s iconic fashion brand, which is known for visualizing creative twists on everyday elements of Beijing life, has since earned the easy going British business people celebrity status among local Beijingers.
6) Mark Kitto
Mark Kitto, author of Chasing China (aka "China Cuckoo"), made the great leap from the intense commercial chaos of Shanghai and a groundbreaking career as an English language magazine publisher, to running a coffee shop in a beautiful, but isolated mountain village Five years ago, Mark Kitto was introduced as a & # 39; mini media mogul & # 39; in China but that came to a brutal end after greedy Chinese investors (with the help of China 's fluid legal system) whole media conglomerate away from him. Now Kitto leads a vastly different life on a mountain in a tiny Chinese village called Moganshan with his Chinese born wife and two young children.
7) Cecilie Gamst Berg
She now works for Hong Kong-based Norwegian Cecilie Gamst Berg is the author Blonde Lotus, a female expat memoir published in English and Norwegian in 2006. She has written for newspapers and magazines in Hong Kong, Norway and Beijing and currently keeps two blogs. RTHK (Radio Television Hong Kong) making weekly radio programs about Cantonese and, for the last two years, has been engaged in film making, putting her Cantonese course on YouTube as well as making documentaries about people & # 39; s daily lives in Hong Kong .
8) Graham Earnshaw
He is a varied background, including a career as a journalist during which he served as Beijing bureau chief for both Reuters and the London Daily Telegraph, and Reuters editor for Asia He has written a number of books, including a Chinese travel guide, the translation of a Chinese kung fu novel, published in 2004 by Oxford University Press, tales of Old Shanghai, published in 2008, and the Great Walk of China, published in He has lived mostly in Shanghai since 1995 and belief that the future of the world is being created in two places - the Internet and China.
9) Chris Taylor
Chris Taylor, author of the Lonely Planet guides to China, Tibet, Japan and Cambodia in the 1990s, and the first features editor at the Taipei Times, looks back on this era in his debut novel, Harvest Season, a racy, chemical-fueled paris of party travelers who push things too far in tourism ___ ___ ___ ___ ___ ___ ___ ___ 0 increasingly hostile locals. A dark exploration of the disabling effects of globalization and travel, Harvest Season also a glimpse of a China most of us never imagined exhausted.
10) Tom Carter
Travel photographer Tom Carter journeyed for 2 years and 56,000 kilometers across the 33 provinces of China, the first foreigner in the history of China to have ever done so. During his travels, Tom racked up an impressive number of arrests and near-fatalities that have His book, CHINA: Portrait of a People, has been hailed as the most comprehensive photography book on modern China ever published by a single author.
11) Rachel DeWoskin
Rachel DeWoskin spent her twenties in China as a consultant, writer, and the unofficially star of a nighttime soap opera called "Foreign Babes in Beijing." Her memoir of those years, Foreign Babes in Beijing, has been published in six countries and is being developed as a television series by HBO. Her novel Repeat After Me, about a young American ESL teacher, a troubled Chinese radical, and their unexpected New York romance, won a Foreward Magazine Book of the Year award. Her third book, the novel Big Girl Small, is forthcoming from FSG in 2011.
12) Edwin Maher
CCTV International in Beijing, China. In 2003, China Central Television bought to expand its CCTV International to be more professional and accessible to Western audiences. CCTV senior executive Jiang Heping approached Maher , already working in China with CCTV as a voice coach, to become one of the first western anchors for the revamped network. In January 2010, it was announced that Mayer & # 39; s life story would have adapted adapted into feature film, starring David Duchovny.
13) Robert "Weird China" Kong Hai
Robert Kong Hai has a bigest twitter (Weird China) Robert is active as a coordinator and financial sponsor of TEDx and other educational events in the Middle Kingdom. He puts his MBA to good use as a trainer in Qingdao where his blonde-haired, blue-eyed, Chinese speaking offspring draw crowds like rockstars. His tweets are a veritable Twipedia of statistics on China. While he does not play in many expat social sandboxes, that making him controversial by With 266,000 followers he might just be a factor in public opinion about China.
14) Jeffrey Wasserstrom
Jeffrey Wasserstrom is a professor of history at the University of California, Irvine, the Editor of the Journal of Asian Studies, and the author, most recently, of China in the 21st Century: What Everyone Needs to Know (published in April by Oxford University A co-editor of China in 2008: A Year of Great Significance, he has contributed comments and reviews to various newspapers and magazines to such as Time, Newsweek, and the Nation.
15) Dominic Stevenson
In 1993, Dominic Stevenson left a comfortable life in Japan, to travel to China. His journey took him from the poppy fields of the Afghan-Pakistan border to the ancient trade routes of the Silk Road, before he was arrested for drug smuggling while boarding a boat from Shanghai to Japan. After eight months on remand in a Chinese police lock-up, Stevenson was sent to two and a half years in prisons in the world, the Shanghai Municipal Prison. His new book, Monkey House Blues: A Shanghai Prison Memoir, reflects on his life in Japan, India, Thailand and China, during which time he took on a varied array of jobs, including English teacher, karaoke-bar host, factory worker and drug dealer.
16) Alan Paul
Paul wrote "The Expat Life" column for the Wall Street Journal Online from 2005 - 2009 The National Society of Newspaper Columnists named him 2008 Online Columnist of the Year. He also reported from Beijing for NBC, Sports Illustrated, the Wall Street Journal, and other media outlets.
17) Alfredo Martinez
China may seem an illegally destination for Alfredo Martinez, a 6-foot-2-inch, 300-pound Brooklyn native who spent 21 months in a United States federal prison for forging drawings by Jean-Michel Basquiat. In August 2007, while living in Shortly after, the secret Communist police arrested Martinez, locking him up indefinitely in in China, the Beijing police burst into Martinez & # 39; s hotel room. a Beijing prison without trial or legal council. After almost dying from physical abuse and squalid living conditions, Martinez was hospitalized and exported back to America.
18) Michelle Garnaut
In 1989, Australian chef Michelle Garnaut opened M at the Fringe in the historic Dairy Farm building and changed dining culture in Hong Kong at least five years before her competition. A decade later, she opened M on the Bund in Shanghai, turning a neat and taciturn Bund building into an elegant wining and dining destination, where she also launched the city & # 39; s first Literary Festival, followed by the opening of the hugely-popular Glamor Bar.
19) Chris Thrall
In 1995, UK-born Royal Marine Chris Thrall came to Hong Kong to make his totune. Once here, his business went bankrupt, and a series of unsuccessful jobs led him to work in Wan Chai as a doorman for one of the largest triad groups , the 14K. Dwelling in the criminal underworld drve him to drugs; he became addicted to crystal methamphetamine, and treated from clinical psychosis. Now, 15 years on, he is ready to tell his story, in his new book, Eating Smoke.
20) Darren Russell (RIP)
When 2004, Darren Russell, 35, went to China to teach English. His mother says his contract promised many things that did not materialize, including a work visa. When Darren threatened to blow the whistle on the school The Chinese police claim he was hit by a car but refused to release Darren & # 39; s body to his An autopsy connected later in the US revealed that, in fact, Darren & # 39; s head had been beaten in. Darren & # 39; s unfortunate case is a prime example China & # 39; s lack of enforceable laws from the top-down.
