Can a Foreign Teacher Live Comforably on 5,000 per month in China?

Outside Beijing, Shanghai and Guangzhou, a teacher can live comfortably on a salary of 5,000 RMB per month.

  • Strongly Agree (26%, 26 Votes)
  • Somewhat Agree (17%, 17 Votes)
  • Neither agree nor disagree (14%, 14 Votes)
  • Somewhat Disagree (23%, 23 Votes)
  • Strongly Disagree (20%, 20 Votes)

Total Voters: 100

Start Date: July 29, 2008 @ 12:03 pm
End Date: October 5, 2008 @ 7:55 am

Salary Poll Results

Discussion

Respondents were almost evenly divided over whether 5,000 yuan is a comfortable salary outside of the three international cities. If we collapse the responses at the two extreme ends and remove the 14 votes from those who neither agreed nor disagreed, we have 43 respondents who either strongly or somewhat agreed compared to 44 who either strongly or somewhat disagreed. If our respondents are a representative sample of the typical foreign teacher in China, then there are approximately as many teachers satisfied with their salary as there are those who are dissatisfied with it.

In some respects, these results surprised me: I expected an overwhelming majority to disagree with this statement. Unfortunately, without knowing anything about the readers who voted in this poll, e.g., specific location, their age, level of education, number of weekly work hours, etc., it’s really impossible to know what these results mean, if anything. Nevertheless, they are interesting to me because I didn’t expect them.

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