TEFL Jobs China

What you Need to Know
about Teaching English in China

Banking and Finances in China:
and Sending Money Home

Chinese people are quite fond of red tape, but you will never have any trouble getting a bank account or a bank card.

Once you have signed the contract with the school or company, it’s their duty to provide you a bank card for your salary. You will be taken to one of the big Chinese national banks like Bank of China, China Construction Bank, Agricultural Bank of China or China Citic Bank or one of many others.

It’s convenient and easy to open an account at any of the above mentioned banks. At large branches of banks you will be met by a person who can speak English. Almost all the staff in banks speak at least some English. So, you will just need to take your passport and your working visa with you, police registration paper and wait for about 20-30 minutes until everything is done - and then you have your ATM card. They will give you a PIN code together with your card, to be on the safe side it’s preferable that you change it at the bank.

When your account is opened you will also get a passbook and the bank card. The bank card is not a debit or credit card, it is strictly for withdrawing cash from an ATM.  Foreign currency credit cards (if you have one) may be troublesome, especially in smaller cities or towns.

Having a bank account is a really a good thing. You won’t have to take a lot of cash with you after you get your wages or if want to buy something comparatively expensive. You can pay with the card. Most shops offer this kind of service, so you don’t have to worry about it. It is completely safe, I’ve been using mine for two years now and never had any troubles with it.

ATMs are everywhere offering a large scope of services: withdrawing money, depositing money, transferring money to other accounts, and services. They operate 24 hours a day, except when ATM runs out of money, which often happens here due to a large population.  For this reason banks set limits on amounts of money you can withdraw at any one time. Usually these limits vary from 2000 to 3000 CNY.  Usually you cannot withdraw more than 20,000 yuan per day.

Sending money back home is easy. There are three different ways to send money out of the country. You can transfer money through your bank, by using Western Union or with PayPal - or any other international online payment service. Sending money through the bank is very costly, altogether you can pay around US$30-50 in fees.

I prefer Western Union, where you pay only about $15 for sending up to $500 and $20 for over $500.

But you can encounter a few problems. Before sending your money you have to change your yuan into a foreign currency such as euro or US$, but there is a strict limit on the amount you can change.   A foreigner can change only the amount of money that is equal to $500.  You will need to have your passport, visa and police registration to able to exchange the money.

Chinese people can change as much money as they want/need. So you can go to a few banks and change 500$ at each or another way is to ask your Chinese friends/colleagues, people whom you trust, if you really need to change more than $500.  Another way is to show a receipt that proves that you exchanged more than $500 into CNY when you first came to China, but this receipt is valid only 6 months after the exchange date.

One more good thing about your personal banking in China is that you can pay your utility bills at the banks and post offices, you don’t have to make a separate trip to each utility. I always go to the nearby small branch of the bank or post office to avoid wasting time in long queues.