An Engineer In Shenzhen

Once travel dates have been made, you need to get a Visa from the China Consulate. There are only a few in the U.S., and some of them don’t accept applications by mail, so it’s a pain. In order to get the business visa, you need:

• Form v.2011a (Visa Application Form of the People’s Republic Of China)
• Valid passport with at least 6 months left of validity
• A passport photo
• An invitation letter from a company in China that says who is inviting you over, when you will be there, a contact person, and why. An email will NOT work. I saw someone with a day wasted because of this mistake. The letter must have a real signature and must have the inviting company’s letterhead on it. It IS acceptable to print off a PDF of the letter they send you, but you need the signature and letterhead.
• Payment (they took credit cards and checks but no cash)
• For the Chicago consulate you need to bring an envelope with postage if you opt to have the visa sent to you by mail.

I was able to get all the details I needed from the hosting company, in the format I needed. Even though I’m arriving in Hong Kong, fortunately U.S. Passport holders don’t need a special visa to visit H.K. for up to 90 days.

I arrived at the consulate just as it was opening, but it turned out that people were already lining up for 45 minutes before open. The experience was exactly like the DMV. Get a number, sit and wait for a long time, and then spend a couple minutes at the desk and get shuffled out before you have a chance to collect your wits. After waiting for nearly an hour, I spent no more than 2 minutes at the desk. I had apparently organized my materials too well. She verified everything was in order and gave me a receipt.

I requested a rush on the visa application for a few reasons. I didn’t want to have to return another day, and I didn’t want my passport getting lost in the mail so close to my departure date. Also, if my visa was declined for any reason, I wanted to know immediately so that I could do something about it while I was still in Chicago. For the amount of hassle saved, the extra $30 rush fee added to the $140 visa application was acceptable insurance.

After the clerk gave me my receipt and told me to return at 2pm to pick up my visa I went out for lunch with some friends that live in town. Then I returned back, stood in line for 15 minutes, and then paid my bill and picked up the visa in another whirlwind transaction that left me slightly poorer but with a fancy sticker in my passport saying I had  permission to visit.

Final tip for the visa application: make SURE you have your stuff together, because you do not want to waste a trip to this place.

It’s a good idea to make an appointment with a travel nurse at least a month before traveling to make sure you have the necessary vaccinations. Some need to be taken far in advance of travel. The travel nurse will tell you about the country you are visiting in terms of health, common diseases, risky behaviors to avoid, and what you can do if you get sick. They will make you afraid. Once you spend a few days in country, though, it’s not as bad as they make it seem.

I’ve traveled to Vietnam, Thailand, and Belize, so I’ve gotten the lectures a couple times. Travel to Europe is easy, but the rest of the world needs some planning.

General advice

What the travel nurse will say

• Don’t drink tap water
• Don’t get ice in your drinks (because it’s made from tap water)
• Don’t eat raw fruit or vegetables (unless it has a protective peel, like a banana) (because food handling practices aren’t the best and even if it was washed, it was washed in tap water)
• Don’t eat food from street vendors (but it’s the best food you can get! why do travel nurses do this to us?)
• Even if people say the water is safe, it might not be.
• Don’t get mosquito bites. AT ALL. Wear DEET all the time
• Don’t pet animals, and if they break the skin at all you’re going to the doctor.
• Don’t swim in any fresh water; chlorine-treated pools and oceans are ok.

Reality

All those horrible warnings really aren’t so bad, and you can adjust your level of protection as you get more comfortable with the place and understand what the actual risks are.

• It’s easy to avoid water and ice, and if you’re in the tourist bubble, it’s especially easy. Water bottles will often come with plastic seals on them to show the water bottle hasn’t just been refilled and super-glued shut on site (if you’ve seen Slumdog Millionaire you know what this means). Waiters who have foreigners regularly already know the drill. Hot tea, carbonated drinks, and beer are perfectly fine. If you live in an apartment complex with other foreigners, meet the neighbors and strike up a conversation to find out about the water.
• The raw fruit and vegetables and street food is really disappointing and difficult to avoid. You’re probably fine if you are very picky about it and only go to the cleanest vendors. Don’t do it regularly. Every encounter is like Russian Roulette with your gut, so have just enough that you don’t feel like you’re missing out.
• DEET all the time is silly. You’re probably going to be inside all day and night anyway, so just be observant.
• Encounters with animals is sketchy. Petting them will give them a few seconds of happiness, but could give you all kinds of parasites or infections.
• DON’T have sex with anything unless you brought it (or him/her) with you.
• DON’T go playing with monkeys, shaking hands with chefs that handled raw pork, visiting poultry farms, or doing anything that will later become a hollywood horror movie. Outbreak, Contagion, I Am Legend, and 28 Days Later were plenty, thank you.

Vaccinations and prescriptions

Many countries have requirements about vaccinations, and there are some diseases that haven’t yet been eradicated.

• Flu – very good idea. The flu vaccine also has bird flu protection, so that’s a plus.
• Hepatitis A and B – Very good idea, but these shots take a while to go through the series of 2 or 3. Get started early. They have life protection, so once you get them over with you’re done.
• Typhoid – A calculated risk. It’s bacterial and treatable, and unlikely you’ll get it. There’s two shots, which will give you a couple years of protection, or there’s an oral series that takes a week but gives you five years of protection. For $70 it was worth it to me. Sure the chances are low, but I don’t know where else I’ll go within five years, and I’d rather not have to deal with it while I’m on travel.
• Japanese Encephalitis – Another calculated risk. Don’t get bitten by mosquitos at night in rural areas.
• Rabies – Stay away from animals! Even if you do get a vaccine, you should still get attention immediately after a bite or scratch. Rabies WILL kill you if not treated immediately.
• TDAP (Tetanus, Diptheria, Pertussis)  - yes please.
• MMR (measles, mumps, rubella) – Most people have had these already when they were young. If you went to school in the U.S. you probably already had these shots.
• Malaria – there are a couple options for malaria, but they’re mostly in the frequency of how often you take a pill. You’ll get a map of where malaria is prevalent. If you won’t be in an affected area, don’t worry about it.
• Dengue – transmitted by daytime mosquitoes. Stay away from them.
• Cipro – a medication for travelers diarrhea. It’ll happen eventually. You can’t live overseas without eating, and every meal is an opportunity for infection. Just accept that it will happen and that when it does you have the tools to deal with it.

You may get other information or recommendations from your travel doctor. Your goal when overseas is to not ruin your travel by spending it sick in a hotel room or hospital, and if you do get sick have the ability to get over it quickly.

Insurance’s purpose is to make sure you’re ok when things go bad, and when you’re on the other side of the world, things go from inconvenient to bad pretty quick. Lost luggage, theft, damaged items mean lost time re-acquiring the things you need. A cancelled trip could be an expensive loss on non-refundable tickets. And most importantly, you need to be confident that if you get seriously sick or injured then paying for it is the least of your concerns.

Some people have amazing insurance that could cover international travel, but most don’t. You’ll likely want to get travel insurance, and the good news is that it’s not that expensive, and it’s easy to get.

Two of the big travel insurance companies are Travelex and TravelGuard. I chose TravelGuard because it was cheaper and the web site was easier to navigate and it allows you to start with a basic plan and add only the features that you want.

Before you purchase the insurance, read the policy. Don’t just skim it; you need to understand what it covers. In some cases it will say it’s acting as a secondary insurer, which means they’ll try to make your primary insurer cover the cost, and if the primary won’t then they’ll do it. Take notes of the exceptions and what is actually covered. It’s also handy to have a copy of what your current insurance covers so you can compare. I noticed that my primary insurance covers out of country emergency care only, and that satisfied me enough to not opt for the much more expensive primary care upgrade on the travel insurance.

Order your insurance after booking your flight because you need to enter the cost of the trip into the insurance. The lower the cost, the cheaper the insurance will be.

Once you have the insurance policy paid for, you may get it in the mail or in an email. Print off these documents and keep them with your passport. If things go bad, you want to have a physical copy of your insurance policy with contact numbers, and you want it to be with you. Losing your luggage sucks and travel insurance can reimburse you for it, but if your insurance information is in the lost luggage, well that’s just ironic.

As a point of reference, for my $1400 flight itinerary and a 3 month stay in Shenzhen, I paid $153 for travel insurance.

Booking the flight is a stressful process and requires careful planning of every aspect. First, you must decide where to land. There’s Shenzhen, Guangzhou, and Hong Kong as destinations, each with the ability to get you into Shenzhen using public transportation. Flights to Shenzhen and Guangzhou are more expensive than HK.

When I booked my flight I decided to land in HK because it was a direct flight (less likelihood of lost luggage), and it was cheaper.

Things to pay attention to when considering flights:

• Layover duration. International travel is not so much fun if you have to run between completely different terminals, and your bags have to make a quick trip across an airport. When I first booked my flight I didn’t notice that I had only 40 minutes between arriving in Chicago and leaving it. O’Hare is notorious for flight delays and difficulty of getting between gates, and for such a large flight it was likely the HK flight would be boarding as soon as my inbound flight arrived, making it very stressful and risky. Fortunately I called immediately and was able to increase the layover.
• Sometimes a longer duration layover or extra stop instead of direct flight is better. I have a 16 hour flight from Chicago to Hong Kong, but my return trip is broken into two sections. Even though the sum is the sections is greater than the direct flight, it’s not as daunting. Having time to stretch and eat and walk in an airport is nice, and some of the fancier airports even have lounges with showers and reclining chairs (Incheon, South Korea has an amazing airport for this).
• Depending on the airline, you can have the first 24 hours after booking to make changes without penalties. This means you can sleep on it and verify it later, checking for stupid mistakes. This came in handy for me when I realized I had a too-short layover in Chicago.
• Seats are important. Some people can afford the upgrades. For the rest of us in economy, you have to do the best you can, but not all seats are equally bad. Go to SeatGuru and check out your flight. It will show accurate seating charts with locations of lavatories, galleys, and highlight seats with particular advantages or disadvantages.

You’ve probably already decided to go, so this post may not be relevant to you, but for me it’s a serious consideration, with many pros and cons that have been weighing in, each with counterpoints.

There is definitely appeal to having products produced locally, pumping jobs into the nation and reducing transportation costs. U.S. pollution controls are much better, safety standards are higher, and workers get more benefits. There may be better communication, less theft of intellectual property or product, and maybe even substantial tax benefits offered by the state. It’s quite possible to make it work.

But business rears its ugly head, and many realities make themselves apparent. In electronics products, many of the components are already being produced in China or elsewhere in Asia and not in North America. Importing those components has a high cost. Assembling the components with union labor is expensive. Tooling and manufacturing delays are more expensive and longer. If the competition has the potential to make a cheaper product that can undersell yours and put you out of business, it’s a race to the bottom. Outsourcing to China is cheaper, and when your business model means being cheaper than the competition, then the choice is clear. But there is a cost to being cheaper, and that’s in pollution, safety, and worker’s conditions.

There are many industries for which the demand for U.S. made products is high enough and the increase in cost is low enough that it makes financial sense to produce the product in the U.S. and people will accept the increased cost. It seems the electronics industry is not one of them, and while I’ll continue to examine the feasibility of manufacturing locally, it makes the most sense right now to pursue this approach. I’ll try to inspect the factories where I produce my product, and ensure that the workers are treated well and that pollution is minimized and handled appropriately. Hopefully everything will work out; that’s what this blog is about.

Me too! This blog is a telling of my experiences in China for three months with a Chinese hardware startup accelerator called HAXLR8R. During this accelerator, we are living and working in Shenzhen, a city whose population in 40 years has increased from 300k people to 10.3 million people, and which is one of the largest manufacturing centers in the world and conveniently located next to the biggest ports in the world.

This is the first post, so let me set the tone and expectations. I couldn’t find anything similar to what I’m trying to do; a single source of information for someone in engineering who wants to go over to China and build a product. It seems that most of the people doing that are doing it for a company and want to keep their trade secrets private. I want to make it more accessible. I want to talk about the logistics of going over there and getting it done. Of the personal aspects and the business aspects.

As of this first post, I have 3 weeks before I go over there. I’m scrambling to put everything together, and the first few weeks after I arrive will have a lot of posts as I learn new things.

Also, I acknowledge that this information will become dated after a few years. Take into consideration the date of these posts when you’re making your own plans, as things may have changed.

If you have experiences to share, other relevant sites to link to, or have found errors, please contact me or post. I’d like this posted information to be accurate and accessible.