Despite pollution, Beijing still top for expats

Beijing is the best place for foreigners to live on the Chinese mainland, according to a recent survey of over 1,000 foreigners by Xinhuanet.com. This might come as a surprise to anyone who actually lives here.

For starters, Beijing's dusty plains and spindly trees are hardly the most attractive scenery around. Compared to Shanghai's lush grasses, or Chengdu's mountains and plains, it's a distinctly arid landscape. The constant grit erodes anything electronic, while once-fine shirts end up smeared with grey.　

And then there's the pollution. Now, admittedly, Beijing is hardly the only contender in that field. But on days when the sky is grimy with filth, or when a snowfall so packed with dirt looks like volcanic ash, it's hard to see why anyone would pick here. Friends report radical health improvements when they move to cleaner cities, from skin cleaning up to lungs suddenly full of power once more. Now, throw into that some of the highest prices in China, especially for housing, and traffic jams, and you have to wonder what's drawing foreigners back to a city where daily life seems to be both uncomfortable and expensive.

What's more, a closer look at the survey reveals it mostly draws upon foreigners living well within the expat bubble of international firms and high-powered postings.

That means gated communities, foreign schools for the kids, and a diet of Western deliveries and foreign restaurants. That's why Beijing and Shanghai always score highest on these kinds of surveys; they offer a range of services catered to the deep-pocketed expats that other, smaller cities just can't reach.

But the truth is, even among regular expats, Beijing has lots of advantages. There're the obvious ones, like size. The scale of Beijing means you have a much better chance of finding people with your own interests, foreign or otherwise.

Any foreigner who's lived in a second or third-tier Chinese city knows how insular and cliquey the foreign communities there, often just a few dozen people, become.

It ends up like high school; everyone knows everyone else, and you're stuck with these people whether you like them or not.　

And Beijing salaries tend to match Beijing prices, at least for foreigners. One of the reasons the city seems so expensive compared to elsewhere can just be that there's an abundance of things to spend money on. When I lived in Shijiazhuang, capital of North China's Hebei Province, I would have been hard-pressed to spend 500 yuan ($79.35) a week. In Beijing, that's an interesting night out.　

Yet what, I believe, advantages Beijing above even Chinese cities of the scale, like Shanghai or Guangzhou, is the culture.

Beijing is the literary and artistic center of the nation, in a way that other cities just can't offer. That doesn't mean there aren't plenty of vibrant local cultures, but for drama, literature, or music, virtually everyone who matters is in Beijing. It has the same magnetic pull for Chinese that London or Paris once did in Europe.

And this applies to the foreign community too. I once went to give a book talk in Shanghai. Beforehand, one of my hosts offered me some words of advice, "This isn't Beijing. Don't expect people to be clever. You'll have to dumb it down a bit for the locals." He didn't mean the Shanghainese, but the expat audience. They weren't thick, but they were mostly people on short-term contracts with big firms, or their families, passing through China for a year or two.　

Meet a foreigner outside of Beijing, and they're probably an English teacher. Meet a foreigner in Shanghai, and they probably work for a bank. Meet a foreigner in Beijing, and they're likely to be a serious translator of Chinese literature, or an art critic, or a sociologist specializing in the long-term effects of factory shutdowns in the 1990s, or a PR consultant for Weibo, or an advisor on constitutional law, or a heavy metal guitarist.

Foreigners here are just more interesting, more varied, more culturally committed, and more likely to be in the country for the long stay.

That's why, despite the dull landscape and the gouging rent, Beijing's still top of the list.