One humid morning in July, Miriam Wickertsheim woke to a phone filled with more than 100 messages from people around the world asking how they could find work in China.
For the Shanghai-based general manager of DirectHR, which primarily recruits European executives for Chinese companies, the surge was striking. Enquiries about China-based employment had already risen steadily over the previous year, reaching roughly 40 a day. But the July flood was different not only in scale but also in the people making contact.
They were not primarily the mid- and senior-level executives who had traditionally sought Chinese experience as a career asset. Recent graduates, technicians, teachers, a carpenter and people married to Chinese nationals were among those asking about opportunities.
“China got cool,” Wickertsheim said. “That is an oversimplified way of saying it, but I think that is what is happening.”
The shift reflects China’s growing visibility in everyday global culture. Its electric vehicles, robots, artificial intelligence and infrastructure have become increasingly prominent online, while a social-media phenomenon known as “Chinamaxxing” has encouraged young people to embrace Chinese technology, fashion, travel and consumer culture.
But the enthusiasm is colliding with a much less glamorous question: if China has become more attractive to foreigners, can those foreigners actually find jobs there?
The answer is increasingly complicated.
China has long been a destination for international workers. Following its entry into the World Trade Organisation in 2001, decades of rapid economic growth created opportunities for expatriates seeking experience in one of the world’s fastest-growing major economies.
International travel to China collapsed during the Covid-19 pandemic, but has since recovered substantially. Foreign entries and exits reached 65 million trips in 2024 and 82 million in 2025, compared with 98 million in 2019.
The revival of interest in living and working in China, however, comes at a very different economic moment.
China is confronting slower growth, subdued wages and persistent pressure in its labour market. Youth employment has become a particular concern, while a record 12.7 million university graduates entered the workforce in 2026.
That makes the idea of a new wave of foreign employment in China difficult to reconcile with the pressures facing domestic job seekers.
Tim Ye, chief executive of recruitment platform HiredChina, said the number of foreign candidates seeking China-related employment had nearly doubled since the end of the pandemic in 2023. But the more significant development is not necessarily foreigners moving to China.
It is Chinese companies hiring foreigners outside China.
According to Ye, interest in Chinese employers for positions both inside and outside China has increased at least fivefold based on views of HiredChina job postings. The strongest growth has come from South-east Asia, followed by the United States and Europe.
At the same time, Chinese companies increasingly want foreign employees for their overseas operations rather than for positions within China.
“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.”
That distinction reveals a fundamental change in China’s economic position.
Chinese manufacturers and technology companies are expanding into foreign markets, creating demand for employees who understand local customers, regulations and business cultures. Consumer electronics, intelligent manufacturing, green energy, electric vehicles, solar technology and batteries are among the sectors driving that expansion.
The result is a paradox. China’s global economic footprint is creating more opportunities for foreigners, but many of those opportunities are appearing outside China itself.
China Becomes Less Abstract
The growing interest nevertheless reflects a genuine change in how China is perceived abroad.
A Pew Research Center survey of more than 42,000 people across 36 countries, published in July, found that China received more favourable views globally than the United States for the first time since at least 2023. In the 20 countries where comparable data were available, nearly half of respondents expressed a positive view of China, compared with 36% for the United States.
Younger respondents in most of the countries surveyed were also more likely than older respondents to hold favourable views of China.
Lizzi C Lee, a fellow on the Chinese economy at the Asia Society Policy Institute, argues that this change cannot be understood simply as an internet fad.
For younger audiences, China’s technological development is increasingly encountered directly through consumer products, social media and travel.
“For a long time, China’s rise was discussed in fairly abstract terms – authoritarian resilience, the world’s factory and so on,” Lee told The Straits Times. “Now, younger people are actually experiencing Chinese modernity in everyday life, either through social media or directly, especially in the Global South.”
Electric vehicles, Chinese social-media applications and consumer brands have helped make the country more tangible to international audiences.
The attraction can also carry an uncomfortable comparison with conditions at home.
Among some young Americans, Lee said, fascination with China’s infrastructure reflects a question about why certain Chinese cities appear capable of building large-scale public transport and infrastructure projects while similar projects face difficulties in their own countries.
“A lot of Chinamaxxing is really asking: ‘Why can they build this and we can’t?’” she said.
Yet the China admired through social media is not necessarily the China encountered by a foreign job seeker.
The Shrinking Foreign Job Market
Teaching English was once one of the most accessible routes for young foreigners seeking work in China. That pathway has narrowed.
At Omeida Language College in Yangshuo, a southern tourist town, seven foreign teachers are employed and the school is largely fully staffed. Vacancies generally arise when existing teachers leave rather than because the institution is expanding.
The school’s founder, Ou Da, has watched the market contract.
“Yes, more and more foreigners want to come to work in China,” he said. “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.”
Yangshuo once had about 16 foreign-language schools, primarily teaching English, at the height of the market in 2019. Ou estimates that only five or six remain licensed, with few operating at full capacity.
The pandemic played a role, but so did China’s “Double Reduction” policy, which restricted off-campus academic tutoring for school-age children.
Omeida survived partly by concentrating on adult education. Its requirements for foreign English teachers — a bachelor’s degree, at least two years’ teaching experience and a clean criminal record — also illustrate how even traditionally accessible foreign employment has become more structured.
The broader lesson is that enthusiasm for China does not create jobs by itself.
Talent Wanted — But Selectively
China is nevertheless making efforts to attract highly skilled overseas workers, particularly in strategic areas such as artificial intelligence and advanced technology.
Shanghai’s 2026 Magnolia Talent Programme, for example, offers eligible overseas researchers up to 300,000 yuan (US$44,733) in individual funding. Chinese technology companies have also offered substantial compensation packages to attract AI graduates trained in Singapore.
This suggests that China’s approach to foreign labour is becoming increasingly selective.
The country may have limited demand for large numbers of ordinary foreign workers while actively competing for researchers, engineers and specialists whose skills correspond with strategic national priorities.
For those who do arrive, however, employment is only the beginning.
Mengwei Tu, a senior lecturer in sociology at Swansea University who has researched international students and foreign professionals in China, said the distinction between wanting to move to China and being able to establish a long-term life there is crucial.
“‘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.”
The difficulties can extend well beyond securing an initial job. Foreign professionals may encounter challenges involving longer-term contracts, children’s education, banking, healthcare and other public services that are often structured around Chinese citizens and domestic identification systems.
China’s physical infrastructure may be highly developed, but the systems required to support a large permanent foreign professional population are a separate matter.
“China is very good at physical infrastructure: public transport, buildings and so on,” Tu said. “But the social infrastructure needed for foreigners to remain long term is not there.”
That creates a striking contradiction at the heart of China’s growing international appeal.
The country is becoming more visible, more technologically sophisticated and, for some young people abroad, more culturally attractive at precisely the moment when its domestic employment market is under pressure.
The foreigners arriving with dreams of working in China are therefore entering a market that does not necessarily need them in large numbers.
Instead, China’s globalisation is increasingly creating another model: foreigners working for Chinese companies, but somewhere else.
The distinction matters. Chinese electric-vehicle manufacturers need people who understand European customers. Technology companies expanding into South-east Asia need local expertise. Renewable-energy firms require employees who understand overseas markets. Chinese companies building global supply chains need workers who can navigate societies beyond China’s borders.
The internationalisation of Chinese business may therefore produce more foreign employment without producing a corresponding influx of foreign workers into China.
For those captivated by China’s metros, electric vehicles, AI systems and rapidly changing cities, the question is no longer simply whether China has become more attractive.
It is whether the country’s economic transformation can create enough space for outsiders to become part of it.
For now, the evidence points in two directions at once: interest in China is rising, but access to China’s domestic labour market remains selective.
Tu puts the tension more sharply. Rather than becoming an easy new destination for global talent, she said, China may be better understood as “a transit point for global talent”.
That may be the most revealing measure of China’s changing relationship with the world: the country is increasingly capable of attracting global attention, global consumers and global expertise — but attracting foreigners to work in China is a different proposition altogether.
