What I actually do here
I do not conduct door-to-door surveys or publish raw price indexes. What I do is simpler, and I think more useful: I collect publicly available information, build original frameworks to read it by, and add the context that spreadsheets leave out.
Most cost-of-living sites give you a table: rent, food, transport, index number. That is fine if you already know what you are looking for. But if you are trying to decide whether to move to Chengdu or Dalian, a table does not tell you that heating in the northeast is billed by the season, or that a city's low rent might come with a job market that barely supports it, or that the teahouse culture you read about exists in one district and not another.
So each piece here follows the same pattern: public data first, then the framework, then the honest limits of what I know.
- Public data as the foundation. Rents, wages, transit fares and utility rates come from published sources — Wise, Numbeo, Livingcost.org, Nomads.com, government statistics, and local news reports. Every figure is sourced at the foot of the article.
- A framework for reading the numbers. I organize the data around the questions a person actually asks when planning a move: What does cheap mean here? What does it cost in daily friction? What season changes the price? What do the wages suggest about the local economy?
- Personal observation, clearly labeled. Where I have lived in or visited a city, I say so — and I say how many times and for how long. Where I have not been, I say that too. My experience is limited to my own circumstances; it is not a representative sample of the whole city.
- Cross-checking against local sources. When my own impression contradicts published data, I note the contradiction rather than smoothing it over. Sometimes the gap between data and daily life is the most useful part of the piece.
- Transparency on AI use. AI tools may occasionally assist with routine technical tasks like grammar refinement or data formatting. They do not generate insights, choose what to write about, evaluate cost structures, or invent personal experiences. The framework, the questions, and the analysis are human.
Where I have actually been — and where I haven't
I live in Dalian, a port city on China's northeast coast. Over the years I have also lived, studied, or worked in a handful of other Chinese cities:
Every city article states clearly whether I am writing from lived experience, from repeated visits, or from research alone.
This matters because I do not pretend to speak for a whole city. My view is the view from one apartment, one commute, one income level. A single foreign resident in Shanghai sees something different from a student in Kunming. A digital nomad in Dali has different daily costs from a factory manager in Dongguan. I write from where I stand, and I tell you exactly where that is.
If you live in one of these cities and something I wrote does not match your experience, that is expected — and useful. I would rather you treat this site as a starting point for your own research than as a definitive account.
What this site is trying to do
There is a gap in how Chinese cities get written about in English. Either they are a data row on an aggregator — Chengdu, index 34.2 — or they are travel posts about pandas and hotpot. Almost nothing sits in between: the ordinary arithmetic of a life, explained by someone who reads the local news and pays the local bills.
So the goal is narrow. Take one city. Gather the public numbers. Organize them into a framework. Then ask the questions the numbers raise but never answer: Why is it this cheap? Cheap compared to whom? What does the discount cost? And if you moved here, what would your Tuesday actually look like?
If that means admitting that a city's low prices are the residue of an economy that stalled — or that the "laziest" city in China works past midnight — so much the better. Those contradictions are the whole point. A cost-of-living table tells you what an apartment costs. It cannot tell you whether you will mind the damp, or whether your visa agent speaks English, or whether the cheap rent is cheap because everyone with options already left. That is the gap I am trying to fill.
What this site is not
It is not relocation, financial, tax, immigration or investment advice. Costs vary enormously by neighborhood, season, household and luck. Everything here is an estimate meant to inform your thinking, not replace a professional.
It is not a representative survey. I write from my own experience and from publicly available information. I do not claim to speak for all residents, all foreigners, or all income levels in any city.
It is also not a political site. I write about rent, seafood, heating bills and commutes. Where economic history is relevant — why a city grew or stalled — I describe it as I understand it and leave the verdicts to you.
Why this is different from the aggregators
I am not competing with Numbeo or Expatistan on data volume. They have more contributors, more cities, and more frequent updates than I can ever match. What they do not do is ask why the number is what it is.
- One person's reading of public data, not a database. I write about cities I have researched deeply. I do not try to cover every city in China — that would mean writing about places I have never read about properly.
- The question behind the number. A table tells you rent is $300. I try to tell you whether that figure includes heating, whether the compound charges foreign tenants differently, and whether the city's best feature is also the reason its wages are low.
- Admitted uncertainty. When a figure is old, thin, or disputed, I say so. I would rather leave a number flagged than pretend confidence I do not have.
- No template text. Every city page is written separately. You will not find the same paragraph about "Chinese cuisine" pasted into twenty different articles.
- Corrections are welcome. If you live in one of these cities and something I wrote is wrong or incomplete, I want to know. The contact page is real, and I read what gets sent.
What's here now
The site has grown past single city write-ups. Eight things live here now, and they all lean on the same underlying notes so they don't contradict each other.
- City deep-dives. The core piece — one city, the full arithmetic of rent, income and daily life, told from wherever I actually stand on it.
- City-vs-city comparisons. A Chinese city set against an international one, chosen for how it solves or fails the same problem — not for sharing a passport.
- Study: universities by city. Cost of living for students, organized by city rather than by school, so you can compare what different universities in the same place actually cost to attend.
- Systems. How daily life actually runs underneath the numbers — high-speed rail, renting an apartment, mobile payments, getting connected, and the rest of the everyday infrastructure a cost-of-living figure assumes you already have access to.
- Calculators. Tools that run the same numbers from the articles through your own income, instead of asking you to do that arithmetic by hand.
- Insights · Match. A short quiz on your lifestyle, budget, and goals that returns a personalized city shortlist — weighted by what you actually care about, not a universal ranking.
- Insights · Browse. A filter that lets you sort cities by the dimensions you value — opportunity, craft and culture, food, climate, history — and shows you where the overlaps fall.
- Insights · Frameworks. Original analytical tools for reading cost-of-living data: Five Kinds of Cheap (why a number is low), Hidden Recurring Costs (what standard tables leave out), Three Lifestyle Budget Tiers (how your daily choices matter as much as the city), and One-Time Setup Costs (the week-one shock before your first meal).
Get in touch
Corrections are genuinely welcome — especially from people who live in the cities I write about. If a number is wrong, a description rings false, or you have a perspective I missed, I'd rather know than leave it standing.
You can reach me through the contact page. I read everything that comes in, though I may not always reply quickly.