Best Advice on Relocation - Moving to Shanghai

Summer is the season that new wave of expats begin to make plans for their move to China. We see the traffic to Shanghaiexpat.com and we see in the questions that come up again and again on the forum. Many will begin to establish relationships with people living here and with possible resources for rentals, language training, schools, services, and more. We are quite fortunate that there are members in the forum who offer their best advice and help make the move easier for the new wave of expats.

So here you are, getting ready for your move to China. Your mind is filled with many details, so many issues, so much anticipation, and enough questions to browse for a month to try to find the answers. We realize that some of the quotes here maybe out of context or connected to particular questions. Please follow the links at the bottom for the full discussions. Here are what a few folks say about some of the issues preparing to make the move.

Where to live? This is question often asked. Shanghai is a big city and there are lots of choices for many different lifestyle. Are you a family with school age kids on a corp budget? Are you young and single and seeking some adverture that doesn't cost too much? One piece of advice is Live on the same side of the river as your work, places you need to go to daily, ( and- or) your kids school.

Photos taken from ShanghaiExpat Cityspace

“Might be tough to come up with a villa ( house ) on 20k a month, but not impossible. There are town houses in town that go for around that. But you might have to be here, have a good agent, and look around quite a bit as these are "deals' and would probably go quick. Much more likely to find this kind of deal on the chinese real estate ( written in chinese ) than on expat boards. Some of the people on this site are pretty savvy and might be able to give you more insight into the current market (with the expat community changes and fewer people with big budgets coming )”

“You should wait until you get here to cut any kind of rental deal. If the company is putting you up, you have some time. Figure out a budget and stick to it. Lots of other threads about dealing with agents and looking for a new apartment. What you will end up with depends on your budget.”

“If you live someplace 'downtown', i.e., somewhere in Puxi that is more strictly urban lifestyle, you can walk/have a short mass trans hop to work, and you're sorted. But what do you imagine your wife will be doing all day? The more central city areas are a nightmare for buggies. The sidewalks are crowded and narrow, with any number of random obstructions in the way, and forget the idea of anybody courteously moving aside to let a buggy have right of way. (More likely they will actively jump straight into your path.)”

“I'm not saying you can't live with out a car and driver. I mean, we don't have one, and manage just fine. My husband walks to work as well. We haven't had a car-based lifestyle in close to 15 years, so I'm a big believer in not having car if you can avoid it. Here, though, in this city, I see how it can be very difficult to do so with a baby. My kid is 4 and is a good walker, which means I don't have to contend with the stroller issue (we ditched ours about a month after we moved here, when we realised it was just way more of a liability than an asset.) We've chosen to live in an area with multiple transport links that is a good bridge between urban and suburban, because it was important to me, too, to be near shops and restaurants and things to do. But, I didn't have the added factor of wanting a particular national community as your wife (justifiably) would like to have for support.”