Foreigner's Who think they Can hide from the Government
China is a great and wonderful place to live and work. However you need to be aware that you must follow the immigration laws and work legally.
No matter what you hear from people in chat groups, online, from schools, education centres, or agents, you can’t work here illegally. You might have heard from people that they have been working in China for years and never got caught, and this might be true, but over the last few years the government has created an extremely good system to track you wherever you go. They have the best system in the world and millions of government officials to track you. If you are one of these people that think you have privacy rights, well you are wrong. The only rights you have are to be a law bidding citizen.
Everything you do in China is linked to your passport, and I mean EVERYTHING. I couldn’t begin to make a list for you because it is far too long. There is no hiding here and everything that you want, including income, a roof over your head, food and the ability to move freely in the city or country is monitored, whether you like it or not.
Nobody living in China, thinks about it as long as they aren’t breaking the law, so they have nothing to worry about. However for people who do break the law, including immigration laws, I tell them the same thing. “It’s not a matter of if you get caught, but when”.
China has the highest technology in the world for facial recognition and can track you in the streets, through the purchases you make, and your mobile phones (whether or not you have your GPS turned on). You can’t use any form of payment to buy anything that the government doesn’t know about. In fact, the government even has a rating system for people who make the right purchases, and it’s like a citizen credit score.
This system is how the government has been able to control corruption, control the spread of the covid-19 virus, have an extremely low crime rate throughout the country and have the ability to act and solve crimes quickly (day or night). China is one of the safest countries in the world because of this system, and because of this, we don’t worry about being watched or monitored.
For an idea of how everything is linked together, you can refer to the picture below.
