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Employment Conditions

The teachers work under a contract which starts first of September and ends thirtieth of June. The teachers work ten months and get paid for ten months.

According to the contract, the teachers are expected to teach about 24 classes a week. Each class is about 50 minutes. The teachers are also expected to work five 8-hour days per week - teaching classes and/or guiding students in their extracurricular activities.

The pay is in RMB - the money used in China. One U.S. dollar is equivalent to about RMB 8.3. The regular monthly salary is RMB 2500. Besides the regular pay, the teachers get an allowance of RMB 500 for food and RMB 500 for utilities (including phone calls). If a teacher stays over for a second year, there may be a small increase of salary.

The school can supply simple meals to the teachers. However, no teacher had in the past taken the option of receiving meals from the school. They all had chosen to take the RMB 500 allowance and buy their own meals and/or cook for themselves.

The salary of RMB 2500 ( approximately US$ 300 ) sounds like very little money. However, considering the low cost of living in China, the money can go very far. Most teachers can not spend all the RMB 1000 allowance for their daily living. The salary of approximately US$ 300 can all be saved for their holiday need. This kind of saving can not be achieved by most of the graduates in U.S. on their first job.

With the saving, most of the teachers in the past managed to take one to two long trips in China plus one trip to South East Asia seeing countries like Cambodia, Thailand, Malaysia or India.

Mandarin tutoring is available to all foreign teachers completely free. Many of our teachers got very good jobs after they returned home because their knowledge in China and her language.

The standard housing for teachers is double room. Two teachers shares a bed room and four teachers share a two-bedroom house or apartment. If conditions allow, the school will provide single rooms for teachers. Single rooms will be allocated on first come first serve basis. The date a signed contract arrives in our school determines the priority. The school will not know who gets a single room and who gets a double room until all the teachers arrive in Huadu.

There are seven houses built specially for the foreign teachers. All the seven houses had two bed rooms and two baths. They were designed by a Pui Ching alumnus, an award winning architect now teaching in UC Berkeley. In the lake side foreign teachers' compound, there is also a club house where the foreign teachers can relax or meet large group of students in special occasions. The foreign teachers' compound has been a show piece of China for the past few years.

The houses are air-conditioned. They are fully equipped with refrigerators, stoves and televisions.

The school will be responsible for a round trip economy air ticket from most major cities in North America to Hong Kong or Guangzhou. Most cities served by United is acceptable to the school. The school will also be responsible for the transportation from Hong Kong to the school. There are many limitations and details concerning the air tickets written in the employment contract. The prospective teachers are advised to read the employment contract very carefully.

The cost of the visa will be born by the school. However, starting September 1997, China will not issue work visa to any teacher without a bachelor's degree. The school can apply the work visa for the teach if he or she can get a letter from his or her university certifying that he or she will be graduating in June and will have a bachelor's degree in September when employment starts.

Any religious activities is forbidden by law and teachers will definitely get into trouble if they try to organize anything religion related.

Although the teachers are expected to work a 40 hour week conducting up to 24 sections of classes, nobody in the past managed to squeeze in that many sections because they will run into conflict with other classes. Regardless what the contract most of the teachers have a lot of free time of their own and they always enjoy spending their time with the students.

If there is any difference between this information sheet and the employment contract, the conditions in the contract will apply.