Thanks for your comments Robin,

My time here is nearly at an end now so I'm not too worried about it. I just wanted to put some information in a couple of prevalent places, namely here and Dave's ESL cafe, so that people could find out these things because they ain't written in the contract.

The contract says no one can live in foreign teachers' apartments without the foreign affairs dept's permission. You work in China too so you're probably aware there's no distinction between "live" and "stay" in their language. No matter, the contract cannot be seen to warn one of this needless and unreasonable impingement on teachers' liberties.

Again, I just want people with the sense to google schools they're thinking of working for to find my messages and find out what I and the majority of my colleagues think is an outrageous policy.

Peter