In short, in Taiwan many people do teach illegally on their student visa (or before the nitpickers jump on me, visitor’s visa with the intent to study or their university-provided ARC) but in Taibei there’s a possibility that you can be deported for it. How big the possibility is I have no clue. Some people on this forum tend to panic about it, but I’ve met several people up in Taibei who teach illegally and don’t give a shit. In the mainland I’ve never heard of the possibility of being deported for teaching a little on the side.
Moreover, when I was in Nanjing three years ago, I was teaching at basically the same hourly rate that you can get in Taiwan ($150RMB/hr, whereas the average in Taiwan is $600NT/hr) and since the living costs were so much lower in Nanjing than in Taiwan, I could teach only about 5 hours/week and that was more than enough for all of my living expenses.
It’s a shame you thought that the food in Beijing sucked. If you were to live near a university, you would be surrounded by fairly good and very cheap restaurants of just about any variety: Korean, Japanese, Sichuanese, Uighur, southern Chinese, Peking duck, etc. On the other hand, I personally think Taiwanese food is twice the price and 1/10th the flavor and that the only area that Taiwan beats the mainland culinarilly is at breakfast. But then again, I don’t live in Taibei.
Yeah, Beijing is dusty and polluted out the wazoo and the weather three seasons out of four are pretty inhospitable. It’s not like Taibei’s weather is that much better. Yes, there’s less pollution, but right now we’re in the middle of the rainy season, and I’ve had to hide away the razor blades before I decide to slash myself.
Another advantage to Taiwan is that the health care system is much better here. I’ve had a couple of issues come up for me recently, and I was treated professionally and extremely cheaply at a hospital near my apartment. I would never go to a local hospital in the mainland and the expat health centers there are very expensive.
What else? The year I spent in Beijing, I didn’t have to deal with the hard-core Beijing accent that much. Yeah, getting the tire on my $5US bicycle repaired was always an adventure, but almost all of my friends were university students from around the country who spoke with very standard Mandarin, certainly more standard than any of my friend’s here. If anything I love picking on my friend’s Chinese here. I’ve got one friend who is physically unable to pronounce “cuo” (it comes out more like “chuo”) and I’ve got another who always says “jie” instead of “jue” and I hassle them to no end about it.
I don’t think the above is not a good rationale at all. If you want to learn a language, it would be ideal to be in a place where you can’t fall back on another language. The main reason why my Taiwanese sucks despite all the effort I try putting into it is because it’s just too easy to fall back onto my Mandarin. It would be cool if I could move to some area of Taiwan where Mandarin is literally not understood at all and I’d be forced to rely on my Taiwanese.
Yeah, the Internet censorship sucks hard in the mainland. But besides that, the political climate there doesn’t really affect foreigners that much. You’d only get in trouble if you were to proselytize for Falun Gong or something like that. If anything, I was much more likely to get into deep, political discussions over there since they actually care about international events. I never felt like I had to give an inch over there while most of them stuck pretty closely to the official CCP line, so there was pretty good fireworks. The most in-depth conversation I’ve had here in Taiwan has been whether Wang Lihong is gay (I think he is) and about the whole Jolin/Jay Chou/Patty Hou love triangle (I’ll take taimei over zhuang ke’ai any day.)
Anyhow, in my mind, the Internet censorship is more than made up by access to extremely cheap and plentiful pirated DVDs.
So why am I even living in Taiwan? Well, I live out in the countryside, and Taiwan’s countryside is WAY better than the mainland’s countryside. But I’ll probably be moving back to Beijing this summer so I can get a decent non-teaching job.