That's the problem right. Learning Chinese wont help you, China is a closed shop, no immigrants, no sharing work with anyone outside the country, no employing people outside China, no cooperation with any other country really; just keep buying their stuff.

Are you nuts or just misinformed? China is investing everywhere. Africa, south America, Russia, EU. And they do have immigrants, as a Western person it’s actually quite easy to move there to study or work. Lots of Europeans I know have studied and worked in China and Taiwan.

China is not a isolationist, monoethnic economy with draconian restrictions on its commerce and immigration. You are plainly wrong, uneducated and defeatist in your take. I'm a non-Chinese person who has lived and worked there for a decade.

China welcomes all skilled foreign talent to come work and take residence in the country with open arms. The process to live and work in China is open and transparent as in any other major Asian economy: first find a job there and second, apply for the visa. You can even work for a major Chinese multinational outside of China, provided that they aren't blacklisted like ZTE by the US government.

Don't enter with the expectation to naturalize and you will find you can do more than you think: go work for Baidu in Beijing, study in Fudan University as a student, or start your own business. Whatever you feel like mostly. Understand that you are on a visa and adjust your conduct like any immigrant in any western country understands.

Learning Chinese has amazing utility but most expatriates can get by without knowing a lick of it, my own family is living proof of this. Any multinational hiring a foreign talent will also hire translators for said talent. In day to day life there is no shortage of people in the city who can speak english, for the rest there are LLM's and translation apps. The Chinese community is behind on truly understanding life from the immigrant's perspective but it is adapting positively.

The most common objection from outsiders is the restricted access to global services like Google, Facebook, OpenAI, the easiest remedy for that is to just use a VPN. You can order a latte from Starbucks down the road in the meantime - or Luckin coffee if you want a better option.

A lot of the fear is unfounded. The local police station is not going to arrest you for accessing the outside world. You aren't going to lose a "social credit score" for being late to work, cutting a line or being obnoxious in public, the scoring system exists but AFAIK it serves as a tool in extreme scenarios, but AFAIK most foreigners don't get one.

Finally, coming back to intentionality of the restriction - most restrictions that irk outsiders are codified and enacted to protect domestic business and individual interests. Reasonable to heavy restrictions on curtailed big American conglomerates and services allowed for amazing domestic alternatives like TikTok/Douyin, BYD, Deepseek to flourish. Companies which provided keystone infrastructure the economy - like Visa - were deemed too critical to allow for a strangle-hold and regulated, for these acted as a foreign tax on every domestic transaction, thus Alipay and Unionpay were born.

I mean, have you worked with the Chinese? They're not like that at all.

They love money so much, you could swear they're American!

Probably get a PR in Hong Kong and hope to be automatically "promoted" to Chinese in 20 years?