It is very important that any new teacher coming to China should work here legitimately, and in order to do so it is best for a teacher to work with a school that is not only entitled to hire foreign teachers, but also knows what it is doing.
At Aihua, we have been hiring foreign teachers since 2002, and we know what we are doing. What follows is a description of the procedures involved in bringing a foreign teacher to China. As an incoming Aihua teacher, it is not important for you to be familiar with all that follows, as we will will organise these things for you. It is important, however, for you to know that we know what we are doing in bringing you over, and that you can feel safe in working with us.
Aihua is fully licensed to hire foreign teachers by the relevant Beijing authorities —- local education departments, the Beijing Foreign Experts Bureau, and the Beijing Public Security Bureau.
We hire foreign teachers twice per year, to start our Autumn term in August, or our Spring term in February. As it takes some time to apply for working visas for our new foreign teachers, we begin to advertise, and to interview potential new teachers, three or four months in advance of our starting dates.
When an applicant makes an application to work at Aihua through our website, or by writing directly to our HR manager, we will first ask to see a CV and then, if the CV shows us that the candidate is eligible for a position at Aihua, we will arrange a Skype interview with the candidate.
If we are satisfied with the interview, we will send you a copy of our contract and an offer of a position by email. If you have any questions about the contract or the position, we welcome correspondence by email, and are also happy to set up another talk on Skype.
If and when you accept a position at Aihua, we will put you in touch with our Foreign Affairs Officer. 
Our Foreign Affairs Officer will write to you, and let you know what documents we require from you in order to make an application for your working visa. All of these documents can be scanned and emailed except for the Criminal Records Check. We need an original Criminal Records Check, and this should be sent by courier, with the relevant tracking number sent to us by email. We begin hiring very early because for many nationalities it takes some time to procure a criminal records check.
You should send your documents to our FAO as soon as possible, because as soon as he receives these documents he needs to translate them. As soon as you can, you should let our Foreign Affairs Officer know which country you intend to enter China from, as this information is included in the official invitation package that you receive from us at the end of the visa application procedure.
Once your documents have been translated, our Foreign Affairs Officer will make an online visa application for you. It takes about two weeks for us to receive approval of an online applications, and once an online application has been approved there is no chance that the application will be refused at a further stage of the procedure. It is at this stage that we will ask you to book your flight to Beijing. Once your flight has been booked, you should send us the flight details, including the airline and the flight number, so that we can track the flight and arrange to meet you at the airport.
After we have completed the online application, we need to take a hardcopy application package to the Foreign Affairs Bureau, in order to apply for your Foreign Expert Certificate. It takes about two weeks for us to receive this certificate after the document package is submitted. When we have the Foreign Expert Certificate, we take this to the Public Security Bureau to apply for your Residence Permit. About a week after submitting the documents for this, we will receive your Residence Permit.
When we have your Foreign Expert Certificate and the Residence Permit, we will send these to you by courier. Once you have these these documents in hand, you need to take them in to a local Chinese consulate to make an application for a z type visa. It might be helpful for you to find the forms that you will need to complete online, in order to fill them out before going into the Chinese consulate. You will be asked for a contract address in China, and our Foreign Affairs Officer will provide you with this. You will also be asked for an Alien Registration Number, and this can be found on the upper right of your Residence Permit. You should be aware that you are being issued with a one month single entry visa, and that once you arrive in Beijing our Foreign Affairs Officer will assist you to change this to a multiple entry, one year Residence Permit. This visa change over will be completed within the first couple of weeks of your arrival.
Once you have received your visa, you should write to our Forign Affairs Officer to confirm your flight details, and your arrival time in Beijing. You will be met at the airport by our school driver and a senior foreign member of our staff, and taken to the school apartment which has been designated to you. The apartment will contain drinking water, cooking utensils, bedding, toiletry, wifi and a welcome pack. We are sure new teachers will be happy with their housing situation.
You will be sharing this apartment with another Aihua teacher. We are very careful in choosing our teachers, so that any teacher that you will be sharing with will be a nice, warm and outgoing person. Also, over the years we have gathered some very nice apartments in the school’s name, and so your apartment is bound to be of pretty good quality. All of the apartments that we put new teachers into are very local to our centre of operations, so that we are able to provide you with full support.
Once you are settle, and have had a rest if you need one, we take you for a meal at a restaurant convenient to your apartment, and then help you to change money, purchase a mobile phone, and find a local supermarket. You need to be registered with the local police department within twenty four hours of your arrival, and we will make sure that this is done.
Within 24 hours of your arrival, you will meet the Foreign Centre Supervisor of the centre to which you have been assigned. The Foreign Centre Supervisor will introduce you to your foreign and Chinese colleagues, and you can start to become a part of the vibrant social life which is such an important part of our school.
Within a few days of your arrival, you will undergo introductory and orientation training with the other new Aihua teachers. There are usually between ten and fifteen new teachers joining our running number of about forty foreign teachers per term. This training lasts for ten day, and some parts of it will be integrated with training for our new Chinese teachers.
At the conclusion of your training, you will meet the Chinese teachers that you will be working with, and you will be given your teaching material and your timetable.
Congratulations: you are now an Aihua teacher!
