Cities: where to actually go, and what for
For years this site ran a business directory for the international — especially African — community in China, filed by city. The listings themselves are gone, and recreating them would be worse than useless: a directory that tells you about a restaurant that closed in 2021 is a directory that wastes your afternoon. What survives is the useful part, which is the cities themselves. These five are the ones people still arrive here looking for.
Guangzhou
The trade capital and the historic centre of Africa-China business. Canton Fair, the wholesale markets by product, and an honest account of Xiaobei today.
Yiwu
The small-commodities market city. How the Trade City's districts are organised, and why low minimums and mixed containers are the norm here.
Chengdu
The affordable inland option: tech and teaching jobs, slower costs, and the notary offices that bring people to this site.
Beijing
Capital logistics: the embassy belt, the university scholarship cluster, and the registration rules that are stricter here than elsewhere.
Suzhou
Industrial-park employment half an hour from Shanghai, and what that means if you are job-hunting in the Yangtze delta.
Choosing between them
- Buying goods — Guangzhou for apparel, leather, electronics and anything you want to see a factory for; Yiwu for small commodities in small quantities. The wholesale markets guide compares them by product family.
- Working — Suzhou and the Yangtze delta for industrial-park and engineering roles, Beijing and Chengdu for teaching and universities, Shenzhen and Hangzhou (not covered here) for tech. See working in China.
- Studying — Beijing has the densest cluster of scholarship-funded programs, Chengdu the cheapest living costs around them. See study in China.
- Cost — Chengdu is materially cheaper than Beijing, Suzhou or Guangzhou for rent, and the gap is bigger than the salary gap for most teaching roles.
What applies in every city
Residence registration, the medical check, the bank-account-and-phone-number chicken-and-egg, and how payments work are the same problems everywhere, and they live in the living in China guide. Document legalization is handled centrally in the notarization guide, though the office you physically visit is local — that is the one piece of city-specific admin worth naming, and each page below names it.
Only five cities have pages here, because only five had enough real demand in the logs to be worth maintaining properly. Shenzhen, Shanghai, Hangzhou and Wuxi all appeared in the old directory and may get pages later; thin pages for all 28 of its locations would be the near-duplicate problem this site is trying to get out of.