The quality of the housing provided to foreign teachers by schools and universities varies considerably and can range from being put up in a dingy 2-star Chinese hotel room (particularly common with short-term summer teaching positions) to being provided with a fairly new, 3-bedroom, 140 square meter (approximately 1500 square feet) apartment with a bathtub. Despite the fact that every school and university has a sizable cleaning staff, the apartment you walk into—often just after having traveled up to halfway around the world—will often be dirty and in a complete state of disrepair: It will appear as if you were never expected. You will either need to be psychologically prepared for this before you arrive or, in the alternative, you must explicitly state in writing that you expect the apartment to be inspected, repaired and painted if needed, and cleaned before you arrive as a pre-condition of the contract (if you do not specify this, they will not bother to do so). Related, if you are applying for jobs from overseas, ask to see representative photos of the same apartment you will be provided with.
Shortly after arriving in China, make certain that you ask to see your apartment before signing the contract (often you will be taken directly to the school’s main branch for contract signing prior to being taken to the apartment). The apartment provided to you by the school is the single strongest predicator of how you will be treated by that employer over the course of your contract. If the school presents you with an unsuitable apartment (controlling, of course, for that particular city's housing standards), ask to see another apartment or, in the alternative, for a monthly housing allowance so that you can procure suitable housing on your own (and make certain this stipulation is added to the addendum before signing the contract). If the school denies these reasonable requests, you should then refuse to sign the contract until you are provided with suitable housing. Unfortunately, this usually becomes a lose-lose situation, because if the school finally and begrudgingly acquiesces into providing you with a better (i.e., more costly) apartment than they had originally planned, they will in turn attempt to have you compensate them for that in other ways, and you will find yourself struggling with them throughout the entire duration of your contract. Therefore, it is absolutely essential that you speak with at least one current teacher at any school you are considering for the purpose of asking explicit and detailed questions about the quality of the housing, as well as the school’s response time to reasonable requests for repairs. If you receive any indication that there are significant housing problems or that teachers are basically left to their own devices if anything goes wrong with the apartment after they move in, you should immediately walk away from the offer.
If you are being provided with off-campus housing, your school is most likely renting from a third party. Chinese landlords see things quite differently than do their counterparts in the West. Landlords typically feel no sense of responsibility for doing any repairs whatsoever to the unit after it is rented. It is just considered the tenant's "bad luck" if the pipes burst or the ceiling collapses. The problem is that if something needs to be repaired in your rented apartment, you could grow old while the school and landlord "negotiate" with each other over exactly who is going to pay for the necessary repairs: Meanwhile, what everyone is really hoping for is that you will either just learn to live with whatever is wrong or, out of sheer frustration or desperation, pay for it yourself (and if you do break down and pay for the repairs out of your own pocket, do not expect to be reimbursed).
A few teachers have also reported problems with landlords storing their possessions in the apartment as if it were a storage locker to be freely accessed at will. You should ask the landlord to remove any personal belongings that he is storing there and you should also establish that he will not enter the premises without prior notice. If the landlord or his agent makes a habit of dropping in while you are out, for whatever reason, change the lock at your expense (an inexpensive thing to do at 40 to 60 RMB). Your school has a right to a key since they are legally the tenant of record.
China has a severe shortage of skilled laborers and artisans. You should not be the least bit surprised if the "plumber" shows up with only a screwdriver in one hand and a pack of cigarettes in the other. More often than not, it will take no less than two visits to fix anything correctly with electrical or hydraulic components. Repairmen will also freely smoke in your apartment and will leave all the repair debris behind for you to clean up. Make sure you have thoroughly tested whatever it is they’ve just repaired before letting them go.
Also, tradesmen often simply gather at "work corners" and people requiring their services pick them out early in the day. So don't be shocked if they show up at six-thirty in the morning. Since tradesmen are essentially picked at random and are unknown entities, they should never be left unattended.
Having written that, your biggest problem will be getting the repairs addressed in a timely manner. Many FAOs and school owners simply don't have a sense of urgency when it comes to making repairs and anything perceived as “household improvements” (such as fixing broken windows or rotted-out internal doors that don’t close or shut properly) will most likely never be attended to. One foreign teacher we know (a middle-aged Western professor teaching oral English at a key government university) was required for months to literally hold the door to his bathroom shut every time he needed to use the toilet (that is, whenever he was not alone in the apartment) before this "minor inconvenience" was attended to. You will need to be patient, persistent and firm.
China is a very noisy place. Of the 11,000 complaints received by the local Environmental Protection Bureau in Beijing, 40% were about noise pollution (China Daily, 2005). People will set off firecrackers under your window before dawn, you will hear "banging noises" late at night and early in the morning in the apartments adjacent to yours, as well as outside on the street. Construction work (and there is always construction work being completed everywhere in China) will go on at all hours of the night and, occasionally, there will be very loud "musical promotions" of new products and services just down the corner from you (that can be heard from as far away as a half-mile). There is nothing your school can do about this. Just bear in mind that noise pollution is a big problem in China, especially from the perspective of foreigners who had lived in the suburbs prior to moving abroad.
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