The end of the ‘China Dream’? Exploring the (inter)mobility of expatriate teachers in international schools after the Covid-19 pandemic

The advent of China’s ‘Dynamic Zero-Covid’ policy in 2020 (until 2023) caused an exodus of expatriate workers. Our paper reports on a study of 11 expatriate teachers in a ‘Chinese Internationalised School’ near Shanghai. Their accounts point to a heightened political environment, with the teachers who elected to stay being ‘poached’ and lured into better jobs with higher pay. At the same time, job opportunities emerged that were not previously available. Inadvertently, a fragmented and competitive scene has emerged, with much (inter)mobility. The ‘China Dream’ still seems alive, for some, but within a new paradigm of precarity and opportunity.