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Dear all,
I’ve been offered a job in Chengdu which will mean transferring from Singapore with a wife and 2 very young kids- naturally my friends and family have been telling us horror stories about how unsafe it is- kidnapping etc.
I was wondering if anyone could share your insights and experiences?
Absolutely no need to worry about kidnapping. The only thing you should worry about is the pollution, I’d say. Get some air filters and you’ll be much better off.
We’re both British raised HK and SG parents so in Singapore we find no problems but keep hearing about kidnapping from our friends.
So now it’s a case of finding out more from you guys and also doing the tax calculations!
Actually, news has lots of kidnapping stories and kidnapping statistics are very high in China. There are huge organisations made up of parents that travel around on busses with photos of their kidnapped kids trying to find them, etc.. and organisations dedicated to retrieving kidnapped children.
However, it seems most of the kidnappings happen to people who are very low on the socioeconomic ladder. If you keep your kids in more up-scale areas, there is typically far more security and awareness around such things, and I don’t personally think it’s an issue.
Like Charlie said, POLLUTION. That’s my #1 worry.
Hi there, we’re from Holland with two small kids here in Chengdu. My main concern like others said is pollution (we’ve got Blue Air airfilters at home and at school, but the kids are too small (and too stubborn) to wear effective face masks on the street on bad days). In any case, if my children are not at school, one of us is with them at all times, they are never out of our sight, so I’m not too concerned about kidnapping (but perhaps it is different for us since our kids are very clearly ‘foreign’, or is that naive?).
In any case, if you want to ask more about living in Chengdu as an expat with small kids, don’t hesitate to PM me. There are several Singapore families at our school too, and I could get you in touch with them if you like.
I don’t think that’s naive Kim, foreign kids draw much more attention in public and I’d imagine would inspire more fear in would-be kidnappers when it’s even more obvious they’re not the parents.. it’d also likely result in a much greater chance that it’d actually be investigated with seriousness and a much larger hammer to come down on the culprits. Makes sense to me! In Terence & his wife’s case, while the kids may not visually look as strikingly different and draw the extra attention, I’d imagine they would not be frequently left alone in the type of area I *think* kidnappings are more common. Also, I don’t hear about kidnappings in Chengdu nearly as much as say, Shenzhen, where kidnappings and ransoms seem to be *way* more common. Statistically I think it’s somewhere in the tens of thousands of kids missing per year, which seems *insane*, just it doesn’t seem to be so much in the more affluent communities or surely it’d be a way bigger issue for the gov’t. Since it mostly affects poor people, gov’t doesn’t give a shit, and police don’t investigate… really terrible situation.
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