Hi, my name is Robert. I am 25 years old, and currently live in sunny Sydney, Australia. I have just returned to Sydney after a year long stint in Beijing, and thought I would start a blog so that I can remain connected with the Middle Kingdom from the comfort of my balcony without the ever looming threat of a PM2.5 pollution level.
All up, I have lived in China three times, totalling about two and a half years. The first was in 2007, when I did a Summer exchange program to Yunnan Normal University, Kunming. I then did a year exchange to Tsinghua University in Beijing from 2009 to 2010, and most recently I was employed by an Australian medical device company to work in our Beijing representative office. I now work back in Sydney in marketing for the same company.
As a young guy studying and working in China, I spent a lot of time with other foreigners, and one gripe consistently came up: apart from the Beijinger, there isn’t really much information out there for the young professional looking to get set up in China. And lets face it: the Beijinger is driven almost entirely by advertising revenue and marketing, so the information that they give out isn’t necessarily going to be entirely trustworthy, is it?
I really don’t know how long this blog is going to last, who is going to read it or who even cares. But I thought that maybe I was in a good position to talk about some of the issues that I faced while living in China, as well as current perceptions of China from business and the community back in the West.
I am not one of those guys that are “China obsessed”. You know, the guys that go over to Beijing, decide that they are going to buy a Mao jacket, memorise Mao’s Little Red Book, talk in chengyus constantly, only eat fangbianmian or gaifan if it costs less than 10 kuai, where green on whatever day Guoan is playingand would never think about getting a VPN to use facebook because, frankly, Weibo is better. No. Those guys are boring. And kinda annoying.
I am more the kind of guy that appreciates China, loves the intricacies and peculiarities of Chinese culture and feels very privileged to be a part of the non-Chinese world lucky enough to live and work over there. But I do take China with a grain of salt, remain critical and outspoken about many aspects of current Chinese life and ultimately look forward to contributing in my working and professional life as much as I can to ensure that China, and its people, make the most of the unique position that they have as we move further into the 21st century.
I’ll try to bring some musings, insights into professional and personal life in China, interesting facts and general chit chat into my blog. Who knows what it will yield….
Zhong Nan Why? 