Meet the 'huapiao': China's drifters from abroad

Hans Martin Galliker gives a lecture at China Graduate Fashion week. [Photo by Yang Yang / China Daily]

Expats share the highs and lows of their lives in fast-changing China.

In 2011, Hans Martin Galliker and his partner Amihan Zemp founded Neemic, a Beijing-based eco-fashion brand. Galliker gave up an accounting job at IBM in his homeland Switzerland earlier to come to China and pursue his dream of doing something related to sustainable agriculture.

In his early youth, the now 35-year-old lanky man used to be a farmer back home. When Galliker made a short trip to China in 2008, he was heartbroken to find how agriculture in the country had been affected by pollution and he wanted to use his knowledge of farming to help reverse the situation.

When he told his Swiss friends he wanted to live here, they asked him: "Are you crazy?"

"But now they know that I am not," he told China Daily after talking to students at Beijing's China Graduate Fashion Week in May. "'It isn't a waste of time and money', they say."

Swiss and other European magazines have started to write about Neemic, which is fetching reviews even in China for what Galliker calls the "power of aesthetics" of the garments the line sells, inspired by nature in their use of organic materials and dyes. But his ultimate goal is to promote sustainable agriculture, he says.

Galliker is among thousands of expatriates who live in fast-changing China, where they either work or study.

And while doing so, many among them also try to adjust to Chinese culture, injecting diverse ideas into society, falling in love with the local food, worrying their heads off about the pollution, choosing to leave or stay, but most importantly, contributing in their own ways to China's further modernization.

Many expatriate accounts in this newspaper suggest there are praises to be sung about their time in the host nation and some sulking to be done as well.

The community has more than 600,000 members, according to the last China census of 2011. Since 2000, the number of expatriates coming to China has grown at an average annual rate of 10 percent. Until a decade ago, the bulk of the foreigners posted in China were usually invited by government agencies to work here.

But in the past few years, many have flown into the country on their own initiative - perhaps to work for global or local companies, among other enterprises. A few have even qualified for permanent residency permits, or "green cards" (about 5,000 by the end of 2013).

As a result of all this, a Mandarin term has cropped up in the country's public discourse: Huapiao. When loosely translated, it means "drifters to China".

It follows in the path of Beipiao, an expression that's used by Beijing natives to describe migrants without a household registration in the city, or hukou.