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Employer Social Insurance In China. I See Foreign People. Part II.

By Dan Harris on Posted in China Business, Recommended Reading

I am a lawyer, not a policy wonk. This means I prefer dealing with the laws as written or at least as they exist, rather than how they might be. I also am not an HR Manager.  This means I find the whole social insurance for foreigners issue in China a colossal bore. Now I know that it really matters to foreign companies doing business there (I am constantly getting emails asking me about it), but it is in such a state of ever-changing flux (yes, I know that is at least somewhat redundant) that it is already driving me crazy.

If you want to know what is going on with social insurance for foreigners, I recommend you read Professor Stanley Lubman’s post on China Real Time Report, entitled, “Chinese Social Insurance: Will Foreigners Be Able to Opt Out?” It does a great job in explaining the current situation surrounding China’s plans to require foreigners contribute to China’s social insurance.

  • Luo feifei

    I have been in China for over 5 years and could not agree more that they have absolutely no clue about what service means. I do consider myself a world traveler since I have been to almost 20 countries and lived for more than a year in at least 3 countries.
    Just to give you more examples about the wonders of so called service in China:
    - I have been to almost all the top restaurants in Shanghai, for western and Chinese food, and anywhere where the dishes suppose to come together (because is a 3 course meal, for instance) we always get one of the people on the table waiting 5 to 15 minutes for their dish to come when the others are waiting for the dishes to get cold;
    - It happened twice the last month that I was in high end restaurant about to order my food, just 5 minutes after the same waiter gave me the menu, but I could not since I was told the kitchen closed and nobody could bother to ask if the clients in the restaurants would like to place the last order before the kitchen closes.
    - Taxi drives are a big joke, first of all because they do not know how to drive and for some reason love traffic jam. I already heard a Beijing driver tell me I am greedy because I asked the invoice;
    - Property management companies are unbelievable clueless about what their service suppose to be. The guys who suppose to fix pipes and plumbs actually make it worst. The only reason I can figure how could they made it worst is because I saw where they “fixed” it;
    - As a huge part of services and huge lack of it, Chinese are the worst people I have ever seen for cleaning. The simply have an extremely low standard for that that unfortunately reflect in every hotel, restaurant, massage, cab, office, their own houses…