The step-by-step plan for China

Working in China takes three papers, in a fixed order. Your employer first applies online for the work permit notification — without an employer that application doesn't exist, so whoever wants to move first and search afterwards has no route here. With that notification you collect the Z visa in The Hague, and after landing it becomes complete: the work permit itself and the residence permit, each with a clock of its own. Clear up one misunderstanding right away: Dutch citizens currently travel to China visa-free for thirty days — for holidays and business visits. Working on that is expressly not allowed, not for a day.

China divides foreign workers into three classes, and unlike in Canada or Australia this is a threshold, not a contest: there's no pool, no ranking and no invitation round. Class B is the standard and the bar is lower than people think: a bachelor's plus two years' relevant work experience — or sixty points on the table, where salary, education and age (26-45 scores highest) weigh heaviest. Class A (85 points, or six times the local average wage) gives accelerated processing, no age limit and a permit of up to five years. Speaking Chinese is not a requirement — it counts for at most five bonus points. Count your points honestly; whoever stays under sixty and doesn't have bachelor's-plus-two knows it now.

The Chinese government isn't the cost item: the work permit is free and the visa costs a good hundred euros per person. The money is in the landing — deposit and agency fee, a home in the expat districts of Shanghai or Beijing, the buffer until the first salary — and above all in one item that overshadows everything if children are coming along: the international school, which runs into tens of thousands of euros per child per year. The calculator lines it up for your situation, before the job offer is there.

Two things the recruitment stories skip. The language: English opens the door at international employers, but the district office, the hospital, the rental contract and almost every app speak Chinese — and unlike the script suggests, spoken Mandarin is quite learnable; start today. The internet: Google, WhatsApp, Instagram and most Dutch news sites are blocked in China. Contact with home shifts in practice to WeChat — for your parents in the Netherlands too — and employers arrange licensed international lines for work. This isn't a footnote but a daily reality; get an honest taste of it this week.

Discuss the things that only start to weigh later. The partner's career: on an S1 family visa your partner may not work — that takes a work permit of their own, with the same threshold as yours. Two careers means clearing class B twice. Unmarried? The legal family circle knows only spouses, children under 18 and parents (in-law) — for unmarried partners there's no route. The AOW trap: for single people the AOW (the Dutch state pension) drops here permanently to the married rate — the full story is in phase 3, but it belongs in this conversation. And the country itself: you're building a life in a state with a filtered internet and a different legal order, where permanent residence is out of reach for almost everyone. For many people it's the experience of their life — but say the trade-off out loud.

Choose below the date on which you want to be in China. The step-by-step plan works out whether that's feasible with what still has to happen — and that's clearer here than you'd think: the job search is the big unknown, but the chain after it is counted in weeks, not months. A target date is yours: you can always move it, and moving it is a perfectly fine outcome.