Down a scruffy laneway off a back street in Shanghai’s Jing’an district the barbershop was a retro gem with a checkerboard tiled floor, heavy duty barber chairs and a fridge full of Coca Cola bottles. It was Sunday evening and already dark but the shop was full, and the red leather banquette along the wall was almost full of customers, most of them waiting for the dramatic fades that were a house speciality.
One of the barbers looked up and asked me what I wanted, and I described in detail the style I was after. The hair should be cut short but the beard just needed trimming so that the volume remained almost the same but with a fade on the sides. “The idea is to make me look young and thin,” I said.
It was a line that always went down well in Beijing, where the barbers laughed indulgently no matter how often I repeated it. Here they turned and looked at me, bewildered and embarrassed on my behalf, and when I took my place at the end of the red banquette the man next to me was staring too.
We started chatting and he told me that he had been living in Shanghai for about 10 years but he was from outside Suzhou, a city about 100km to the west that is famous for its classical gardens. Ostentatiously muscular with a handsome, lived-in face, his name was Jun and he worked as a personal fitness trainer.
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I asked him how old he was.
“42 or 43,” he said.
It’s the kind of answer you often hear in China, where it doesn’t indicate any uncertainty about when they were born but reflects the traditional nominal age system. This holds that a child cannot be zero years old so that every child is born at the age of one.
At the first Chinese New Year after their birth the child turns two and they become a year older on every subsequent New Year. This means that if you are born in December you will be two years old by February only two months after your birth.
Jun said his business was flourishing before the pandemic when most of his clients were foreigners living and working in Shanghai. In those days he was wary about taking on Chinese clients because their expectations were often unrealistic. “After 10 sessions they’d complain that they didn’t look like me yet,” he said.
He is a less discriminating today because over the past couple of years the bottom has fallen out of his career as a freelance trainer unattached to any gym. And it’s all because of the foreigners. “They’ve all gone,” he said.
The number of foreigners living in Shanghai, China’s most international city after Hong Kong, fell dramatically during the pandemic. And almost two years after the end of the zero-Covid policy, they have not come back.
European companies in China complain that they struggle to attract foreign talent, citing a number of factors including the country’s worsening reputation abroad. Geopolitical tensions and China’s sluggish economy have contributed to a trend that has seen international corporations value Chinese experience less than before.
Police raids on foreign companies, including due diligence firms, have scared some business people away from China, as have some high-profile cases of the use of exit bans. Almost exclusively used in civil actions, these bans have prevented business executives from leaving China while debts owed by their company remain unpaid or disputes unresolved.
The expat exodus has had a secondary economic impact on everything from Shanghai’s high-end bars and restaurants to international schools and kindergartens, some of which have closed or scaled back their operations. This has in turn reduced the demand for foreign teachers, already dampened by China’s slowing birth rate and a crackdown on private tutors.
Earlier this year Jun gave up his apartment in Shanghai and moved back to his parents’ home outside Suzhou. His sister, recently divorced, also moved home a few months ago, so it is a crowded house and Jun tries to get away as often as he can. He still has a few clients in Shanghai and he tries to group their sessions together so that he comes to the city only twice or three times a week. He stays in a hostel, in a shared dormitory.
The Chinese authorities have introduced a number of measures to boost foreign tourism, including visa-free access for a number of European countries including Ireland and easier use of cashless payment systems. Tourist numbers are recovering and Shanghai remains among the most popular destinations in China, particularly among Europeans.
Shanghai’s municipal government this week announced new, simplified visa, residency and work permit procedures for foreign talent, particularly those with doctorates, in the hope of replenishing the city’s stock of highly skilled, highly paid expats. For Jun and numerous others who have long made a living catering to the needs of foreigners in the city, it can’t happen quickly enough.