Shanghai tops expat desirability list

China Daily

To Majdi Alhmah, a Syrian Director General Manager of BFG International China in Changchun, Jilin province, who has married a Chinese woman, the city of Changchun has given him plenty of warmth.

"Chinese people view family values very importantly, I really appreciate this. My biggest achievement and happiness after coming to China is them (referring to his wife and their son.) I am half Chinese in my bones," said Alhmah.

Localization and domestication

Smart phone app WeChat has surpassed Weibo as the most favored app for connecting with family and friends for expats.

In a multi-answer question, 66.5 percent of expats said they use WeChat. Facebook, the world's largest photo sharing application, ranked second at 56.6 percent. Thirty-nine percent use Tencent QQ and the user rate for Weibo was only 22.4 percent.

Use of social media was widely localized but more than half of expats living in China (52.8 percent) still chose to read news from home. Only 28.3 percent of participants answered that they read news released from Chinese media, but this tendency expressed a positive correlation with the age of expats.