Ask Headmaster Ken

Your FRP is valid until it either expires or is cancelled by the PSB - regardless of what happens to your school.

Like Dr. Greg, I have no idea what will happen to your school.

You'll have to make your own decisions based on your desires and options available.

In my own experience, problems at the beginning of a relationship are danger signals that ought not be ignored.

Cheers.

Hello Dr. Greg and Headmaster Ken,

I hate to beat a dead Terracotta Warrior's horse with this thread but I am going to.

I finally received my foreign residency permit (FRP) but was not given my foreign expert certificate (FEC): a school in Suzhou has it although I work in Nanjing. As timing would have it, after nine months, I am quite sure my school is going under. I had to strong arm my director to pay me my 12,000 yuan salary by refusing to teach a class full of students.

He pitifully whined to me about the cost of running the school and said he would pay me that day out of his own pocket (which he did) if I would teach my class. Now, a week later, he still owes me 6,300 renminbi in overtime and five other Chinese teachers overtime totaling more than 13,000 yuan.

Consequently, my Chinese co-workers (I am the only foreigner) want to go on strike and want me to join them but I will not. This comes after they asked for their money and he told them if they didn't like it they could resign and then tried to get them to sign letters of resignation. This comes despite the fact that July and August were the school's busiest months but I came to find out that we were full of students just because they reduced the tuition 33 percent and it seems to me they didn't budget this appropriately in regard to factoring in teacher overtime pay.

Anyways, the head Chinese teacher (who has unwillingly inherited the title of FAO) is telling me that the director has been afraid that as soon as I get my FRP that I will bolt and leave him high and dry to work somewhere else... how can this be? Could it be that since he got my FRP through guanxi that he will be too embarrassed to tell them to cancel it? Why is he not giving me my FEC? Does this very from province to province?

I have three weeks until I get a two-week vacation and when I return I have six weeks on my contract, but my FRP is good until September 2012. Another staff member who has done foreigner's paper work for other schools as well as an American I know is telling me that as long as I stick out the contract and leave on good terms I can stay here legally until Sept 2012.

Headmaster Ken has the stinky tofu gone to my head? Should I just play it safe and leave at the end of my contract and apply to come back properly from the US or perhaps the Philippines (I am thinking of going there for two months to decompress and job search in hopes of going to Taiwan after Spring Festival)?

To all that read do not come here on less than a Z-visa to earn money. You will find yourself looking over your shoulder the whole time and being taken advantage of by employers.

Your FEC is tied to a specific employer and actually belongs to the school. When you leave, you are supposed to surrender it to your current employer. Some foreign teachers "forget" to turn it in. So, some employers "forget" to ever give it to the FTs in the first place.

Since the FEC has few uses nowadays, many employers keep them so they don't have to bother with replacing lost ones.

The FEC does have one very useful purpose however, it is necessary to obtain a transfer of your FEC from your current employer to a new employer.

Your current employer sounds most unlikely to put the FEC in your hands.

You cannot live legally in China solely on an FEC. Your source is incorrect about that. It is the foreign residence permit (FRP) that allows you to live and work in China. It also serves as a multi-entry visa.