Employment & Professional Development

Are there opportunities to teach Business English and live on Hainan Island? I've been reading the article on Hainan Island and it sounds like a place that would suit me. I would prefer to teach adults if at all possible. The article also mentioned living in Yunnan province. Can you say more about those possibilities? Which cities?

Thanks for the help.

The Haikou city guide you read is based on the four years that I lived and taught on Hainan Island, so I moved your question to this forum.

From my perspective, teaching opportunities in Haikou are quite limited and that largely explains why there aren't many foreigners living there (less than 500 I would say, if that).

What few teaching opportunities exist at private schools are primarily with children, not adults. There just isn't a great deal of need for Chinese adults on Hainan Island to learn English, aside from personal growth or self-improvement, unless they are in the hospitality industry. The problem there is that the hotels don't want to pay very much for training, so there isn't much incentive for private school owners to get involved with it. School owners make money by charging per student, but hotel managers only want to pay a maximum of 150 yuan per class, irrespective of the number of students. Occasionally, some independent recruiter (Western and Chinese) will catch wind of a hotel in need of training and will approach a foreigner to teach the class for 100 yuan per hour, while pocketing the remaining 50.

Hainan Island is a great place for Westerners to retire, not work, which is why I am no longer there. If given the choice, I would much prefer to live in Haikou than Guangzhou, but I'm not quite ready to retire yet. In Guangzhou, I actually have a career again, i.e., teaching in my field and maintaining a private practice in psychotherapy. These same opportunities simply don't exist in Haikou.

In regard to Yunnan province, I mentioned it only in regard to salary comparisons and don't know anything about what it is like to live or work there. Based on a little bit of exploration some three years ago, I can tell you that the teaching salaries are probably among the lowest in the country. Foreigners live in places like Kunming and Haikou for the climate and lifestyle, not for the work or money. Conduct a search on "teaching in Kunming" and see what you come up with.

Best of luck.

Many thanks for the speedy reply.

So I may have to cross Hainan Island off my list. Darn.

Do you recommend applying with the few universities on the island to teach adults instead of children? I don't need to make a lot of money but I do want to build a portfolio of experience in ESL so I can transfer to other parts of China should I like this initial experience.

I am like you, not quite ready to retire but I'm also not sure that a huge Chinese city would be 'healthy' for me to start this adventure.

Regards...

You could apply to both Hainan and Hainan Normal Universities; I wouldn't bother with the others. I think the contact information listed in the Haikou city guide for them is still valid.

Best of luck with that.