The question
People write to me about this, and the messages arrive in the same shape. A young man, early twenties, asked whether he could find work on this coast and whether there was anything that paid more than 3,500 yuan a month (about $490). He was not rude about it, and he was not unrealistic about anything except the place. I looked at the message for a while and did not know how to answer it, which is unusual for me and is the reason this chapter exists.
What makes it hard to answer is that it is not one question. It is two, asked by two different people, and the answer comes out opposite depending on which one you are.
If you have a trade — you can cook, you can make something with your hands, you can fix a thing, you can cut hair, you can run a stall — then part of what follows does not apply to you, and there is a real, small, unglamorous living here that a few people are actually making.
If you have no trade — if what you know how to do is sit in an office and answer messages and attend meetings — then none of that is worth anything on this coast, because there is nobody here who needs it. The answer for you is different and harder.
That is the whole chapter. Everything below is the working.
Why there are no jobs here
Start with the shape of the place, because the absence of jobs is not an accident or a policy failure. It falls out of what this town is.
Silver Beach is a holiday settlement, and a holiday settlement is a machine that runs for two months a year. It was built by property developers for people who wanted a flat by the sea, and the buyers turned out to be, in the main, retirees with a pension. They arrive in May and they leave in October, or they come for a week in August. Either way they do not spend money here for ten months of the year, and the whole local economy sits downstream of that one fact.
There are no companies. This is the part that people who write to me find hardest to believe. I do not mean there are few employers. I mean there is not a single employer of the kind a young person with a degree is looking for. No factories, no call centres, no logistics hubs, no branch offices, no headquarters. There is a town government, and there is a school, and there is a hospital, and there is the property industry, and after that everything that employs anybody is a small business owned by the family that runs it.
And a family business does not hire. That is not stinginess, it is arithmetic. If you run a dumpling shop with your wife and your brother-in-law, you do not need a fourth person. If you did need a fourth person in August, you would need them for six weeks, and nobody wants to be trained for six weeks of work. So the handful of jobs that appear in a summer are cash work with no contract, and they last as long as the weather.
The local population is farmers and fishermen. On this coast that means people who farm a few mu of land, or go out on the water, or sell seafood in the market, or work one of the oyster farms along the shore. The oyster farms do hire — but they hire their own relatives and people from their own village, and they hire them because they have known them for thirty years. An outsider arriving with a rucksack is not in that queue, and there is no way into it.
So when a young man asks me whether he can come here and get a job, the honest structural answer is: with whom? There is no employer. The question is not “is there work”, it is “who would pay you”, and the answer to the second one is almost always nobody.
There is one pocket of young consumers on this coast and it is easy to miss. At the eastern end, past the last of the resort compounds, there is a campus of a vocational university, with thousands of students on it, behind a wall. They are the only reliable young spending in this prefecture. Every business decision made on the east side of this coast is made with them in mind, and every business decision on the west side — the side I live on — is made with them out of mind, because nobody is going to travel half an hour for lunch.
There is a joke here that is only half a joke. Weihai has no young people. People say it about the whole prefecture, lazily, in the way people say things that are also true. The young people who grow up in these towns leave — for Weihai, for Yantai, for Qingdao, for Beijing — because that is where the wages are, and the ones who stay are the ones who inherit something. A young person coming into Rushan to look for work is swimming against the only current there is.
And then there is the number, because 3,500 yuan is the number everybody asks about. Someone asking for 3,500 a month (about $490) is not being greedy. In a small county in Shandong, 2,000 to 3,000 is an ordinary wage and 3,500 is a good one. The problem is that here you are not competing for a good wage against other workers. You are asking for a wage from an economy that does not contain wages. The 3,500 does not exist here for the same reason there is no underground railway: it is not that the price is wrong, it is that the thing is not on offer.
The trade that built the town
For twenty years, almost every business on this coast was downstream of one industry, and the industry was building flats that nobody lived in.
The trade that a young person could actually enter was the estate agency. At the peak there were agencies everywhere. This is a strip of about two hundred compounds, and for a long time the easiest way to find your way around was to read the shop signs, because one in four was an agent. The work was not complicated. You needed to know the compounds, you needed a phone, you needed to be willing to sit in a sales office in the evening, and you needed to be pleasant to people in their sixties.
Around the agents sat the trades that serve a house: renovation, plumbing, wiring, air conditioning, furniture, hardware, glass, bedding. And around all of those sat small restaurants, because the men doing the renovation work have to eat lunch somewhere. That was the economy. It was not a good economy and it was not a stable one, but it was an economy, and it had room in it for someone in his twenties.
That has gone. The number of new flats going up here has fallen close to zero, and a business that exists to sell a thing that is no longer being made has to find something else to sell. I know agents in their twenties, thirties and forties who have taken other work, tried another trade, or left the coast entirely. The ones still in property are doing the only two things that still move: second-hand sales, and rentals.
I have a small piece of evidence for the direction of travel, and I like it because it is the kind of thing nobody writes down. When I first came here, the market in the morning had people standing at the entrance handing out printed property listings — a sheet with the compound, the floor, the size, the price and a phone number, pushed at every middle-aged person going in to buy vegetables. In my first year I was handed one several times a week. Last year I do not think I was handed one at all. Not because they know me now. Because there is no longer a business in printing them.
The building sites were never staffed by young people either, which is worth saying, because “why not go into construction” is the obvious next question. The bricklayers, the carpenters, the men tying rebar, the men on the scaffolding — on this coast they are in their fifties and sixties. They travel in crews from other provinces and they work for people who have used them before. It is not a trade that opens for a newcomer, and beyond that, the sites have mostly stopped.
The seven directions
There are seven things a young person can try here, and the honest way to set them out is one at a time, with the cost attached to each. The list is the easy part. The cost is the part that never makes it onto the list.
One: property. Rentals and second-hand sales. Still functioning, still the most obvious thing a newcomer might try, and shrinking. The work is finding flats that owners who never come here want to let, finding people who want them, and taking a fee. The fee on a 4,000-yuan annual rental (about $560) is small, which is why agents want sales. A person entering this trade now is entering a business that has been contracting for several years. You are allowed to do that. Do it knowing it.
Two: self-media and remote work. This is the one that fits, and I will come back to it at length, because for anyone without a trade it is the whole answer. What matters about it is only this: the work does not need this town. The customers are not here. The money does not come out of the local economy at all. A person who can already earn online can earn here more easily than almost anywhere else in the country, because the rent is nothing. A person who cannot earn online will not start now because the rent is cheap.
Three: a small shop. A food place or a small shop, on a busy corner near the gate of a compound. Catering is the most common. Here is the cost, and it is the number this chapter keeps returning to: the season is two months long, and many food places shut in October and do not open again until March or April. That is nearly half the year dark. What you buy with the rent is a two-month business attached to a six-month liability.
The kind of shop matters as much as the location. A place that sells what people need every week — a small grocery, a hardware stall, somewhere that does repairs — is not seasonal in the same way, because the people who live here all year still need things in January. What is seasonal is anything that depends on the visitor: snacks, ice cream, seashells, seafood, anything you buy on holiday and would not buy at home. The mistake I see most often is somebody opening a holiday business in a town where the holiday lasts eight weeks.
Four: a pitch at the night market. Both halves of the coast have one. You rent a space and you sell something you cook or something you make. The difference between the two halves is the only real strategy on this coast. The western night market empties to nothing in the off-season — I have walked through it in January and counted the stalls on one hand, and they were selling vegetables to nobody. The eastern one is beside the university, and during term it has students. Students eat, students have pocket money, students buy at eleven at night. The eastern market is busy all year except the holidays, which makes it a completely different business from the one on the west side. That is why people who understand it go east.
Five: a unit inside a mall. This is new. The mall in the east opened recently and brought in the chains — fried chicken, pizza, a bubble tea brand, a coffee chain — and around the chains there are small private units: hairdressers, noodle places, a cake shop, a café, a nail bar. There is a second, larger mall under construction on the western side, supposed to open within a year. Compared with a market pitch, a mall unit is a better environment and a more formal arrangement: air conditioning, a floor that gets cleaned, a landlord with a management office, and a customer base that does not depend on the weather. It is also more expensive, and it is still a two-month town. The honest thing to say is that this is the direction in which things have genuinely improved in the years I have been here, and it is where a young person trying to run a small business has the best chance of lasting more than a season.
Six: delivery, and the trades around it. Riding for the food platforms, driving for the courier companies, running a parcel collection point, driving a van. Now the detail that explains this whole category. In the western half of Silver Beach — the half I live in — I was told there used to be eight delivery riders. Eight, for a stretch of coast with dozens of compounds. Not because the platforms will not sign people up, but because nobody orders. The permanent residents are in their sixties and seventies, they cook, and a delivery fee is a fee they will not pay. In the east, beside the university, students order constantly and there are restaurants to serve them, so there the work exists, at least during term. Courier work has the same shape: the volume is small, the depot is thin, and when it thickens it is in July and August, and what the depot does then is take on one extra person for a few weeks.
Seven: security and cleaning. Every compound has a gatehouse and the gatehouse needs somebody in it. What the young man who wrote to me needs to understand is who is in it. Those jobs go to men and women past sixty, they go to them before they go to anyone in their twenties, and there is no version of this in which the newcomer is preferred. It is also worth knowing that a great many of these compounds are almost empty, so there is nothing to guard and nobody to clean for, and the ones that are not empty are budgeted the same way.
So: seven directions. Six of them sit downstream of foot traffic, and foot traffic is two months long. The seventh does not. The seventh is the one you do with a laptop.
What it costs to try
I want to put numbers on the optimistic side, because a person reading a chapter that says “there is no work here” will reasonably conclude that I am telling them not to bother, and that is not quite what I am saying. Some people do bother, and a few of them make it, and here is what the attempt actually costs.
The pitch is not free. This is a small thing that nobody mentions. Standing in a village market with a table of goods is not a right and it is not a favour. The market publishes its stall fees on a notice board at the entrance. I only noticed because I walked past the board one morning at the big market at Gongjia. So the smallest version of the plan — buy some goods wholesale, put them on a table, sell them — starts with a fee, and the fee is charged by the day, and somebody comes round to collect it.
The shop. There is one unit in the row near my compound that I have watched change hands. In the first year it was a fast-food place: rice, a few dishes, opened in spring. It lasted a few months, and then the season ended, and there was nobody to sell to, and it closed. In the second year somebody put a different restaurant in it, with a bit more of an identity, a specialty. That lasted a few months too, for the same reason. In the third year it became a place that does massage and health treatments for elderly people, which is at least a business whose customers live here all year. I do not know how the third one is doing. I do know that in the row of shops by my gate the tenant changes almost every year, and I have written that down more than once, because it is the most efficient summary of the local economy that I have found.
The season, in one sentence. I wrote this in my diary in the third year and it is still the best version of it: doing business on this coast means working two months and resting ten.
The off-season, in one number. I follow some of the sellers here the way other people follow athletes, because their videos come past me and I cannot help watching. One of them sells Shaanxi noodles. He posts most days. In the off-season he said he was taking under a hundred yuan a day (about $14). Not profit — takings.
Rent is the trap, not the obstacle. A pitch or a small unit is not expensive by the standards of a city, and that is exactly the problem. When the costs are this small, almost anybody can open something, so almost anybody does, so the competition for two months of customers is not thin. The two months are the same two months for everybody. A cheap place to live and a cheap place to trade are the same fact, and the fact cuts both ways.
And the ones who are actually doing it. I do not want to leave you with the impression that nobody manages. There is a woman who sells braised meat and cold noodles from a pitch in the western night market. She works afternoons, she has customers queuing, and she films the whole thing every day — buying the ingredients, cooking, the stall going up, the customers, how much she took, talking to people. Every time one of her videos comes past me I have the same reaction, which is the reaction of a bad student watching a good one. I have also met a man who came here the same year I did to lie flat and who now has a stall selling drinking snacks — peanuts, cucumber, chicken feet, crayfish — with three small tables and cold beer. He gave me a box of food once, without being asked, and I was embarrassed by how little I had to give back.
Two people. Out of everyone who has passed through here in four years, those are two I can name, and if I stretched it I could maybe name five. That is the ratio.
If you have no trade
Now the part that is advice.
If you have a trade, come. Cook, bake, barbecue, cut hair, fix air conditioners, clean, sew, repair phones, do nails, do massage, look after an old person. These are real here. Not rich, but real: the money is small, the season is short, the customers are old, and a person who is good and cheap can make a living that would look absurd to anyone in a city. The most under-exploited fact about this place is that it is full of people in their seventies with pensions and hours to fill. Almost nobody is selling to them except a few tired shops. Health treatments, massage, hairdressing, taking groups of old people to the hot springs, taking them on trips — this is what the customers here actually spend money on, and hardly anyone under forty has noticed.
If you have no trade, do not come here to start. Your office skills do not transfer. Nobody on this coast needs anyone to manage a project. If what you can do is what a big city pays for — spreadsheets, meetings, presentations, accounts, code, design — then this coast, on its own, has nothing to sell it to. You will arrive with an expensive set of abilities and no buyers.
There is one exception, and it is the one I keep giving: work that does not care where you are. Self-media, an online shop, writing, illustration, design done remotely, games, streaming. If that is your plan, understand two things about it.
The first is the money. I do this. I write, I film, I put the same output on six platforms, and I have done it for four years, and I earn between 6,000 and 9,000 yuan a year (about $830 to $1,250). A month in which I take a thousand yuan (about $140) is a very good month. That is not modesty and it is not a run of bad luck; it is roughly the top of the range for this work done without a face and without a team, and it is close to what nearly everyone who does it actually gets.
The second is the arithmetic of surviving on it, and it has two halves. The coast costs about 10,000 yuan a year (about $1,390) if you live the way I live. Two thousand a month from online work — 24,000 a year — would cover that with room left over, and that is the number to plan around. But the number that decides whether you can do this is not the income, it is what you arrive with. I can live on a thousand yuan a month of writing income because behind me there are years of a salary that I saved. A person of twenty-two has no such years behind them. This life is not supported by the coast. It is supported by money earned in a city and spent here. Take away either half and the whole thing falls over.
Content about this place travels, by the way, and people should know that, because it is the one genuine advantage. This coast has an unusual amount of national curiosity attached to it, because it has an unusual set of facts: flats for a few tens of thousands of yuan, a resort with nobody in it, a place that is officially a holiday zone and empties in October. People make videos about the flats, about digging for clams, about the village markets, about going to the beach in winter, about what a month costs, and some of those videos get watched by hundreds of thousands of people. The subject matter is here. The shortcut from being watched to being paid is not, and that step is where nearly everyone who tries this falls down.
And then there is what the internet tells you about it, which is mostly a lie with a screenshot attached. A stall earns ten thousand a month. Three days of streaming buys a car. I have read this material too. What those stories are is somebody’s luck presented as their effort and somebody’s family money presented as their own hard work, and the person selling the story is usually being paid to sell the story. If a course on how to make money without working costs 2,000 yuan (about $280), then the working part of that sentence is not the part you are buying.
One last thing about the obvious fallbacks, because everybody suggests the same three. If you cannot find work, deliver food, deliver parcels, take a job as a security guard or a cleaner. In a city, that is a genuine floor. Here it is not a floor, it is a ceiling with no headroom. There are eight riders in half the town because there is nobody to order. The courier depot takes on one extra person in July. The gatehouses and the cleaning crews hire people in their sixties, they will keep hiring people in their sixties, and no twenty-year-old is going to displace them — nor should they want to.
What I tell them
So this is what I answer, and I answer it one of two ways depending on which person is asking.
If you want to live here and you are not trying to build anything: work in a city first, then come and rest. Get a job for two months somewhere with wages, save what you can, then come here and live on it for ten. When the money runs low, go back and do it again. A flat here rents for three or four thousand yuan for the whole year — a flat, not a room — and food costs what food costs in a small town, which is very little, and a person with a few thousand yuan behind them can last a long time on this coast doing nothing at all. That is not a failure of ambition. It is the actual design of the place. This coast is somewhere to rest, not somewhere to work, and the fastest way to be miserable here is to arrive needing it to be the other thing.
If you are determined to earn here, bring something with you. Either a trade that the people who live here will pay for, or an online income that is already running before you get on the bus. What does not work is arriving with no trade, no online income, and a plan to work it out from the beach. I have watched people try that. They last a summer, they run through their savings, and they go back to the city telling people the sea is boring — when the sea was never the problem.
I have been here four years, which makes me an old man of this coast, and the thing I have seen most is not failure exactly. It is turnover. Young people come here the way the tide comes in: in a wave, all at once, and then it goes out, and then another wave comes, and almost none of them are still here by the following spring.
The shop under my window is the whole story. It has changed hands nearly every year I have been here. Somebody paints it, buys the equipment, opens, gets through the summer, and in November I see the shutter down, and by the next spring there is a different name on the board and a different person behind the counter, and it is the same counter. I do not think any of them were wrong to try, and I do not think any of them were lazy. They came to a place with two months of customers in it and expected twelve.