. You also think that laowai should be grateful for having a free apartment.................why? If you invite someone half way around the world to work for reasonably low salaries then you must at least provide a clean and spacious apartment for free

Why on earth should an apartment be free? You don't get free accommodation with jobs in your own country, why expect it in China?! You choose to move halfway around the world, nobody makes you! And relatively low income? Please! The salaries FTs get are quadruple the amount most similarly qualified Chinese people make and they don't get free apartments! All the employer should do is assist with finding you suitable housing and any language barriers that come up when you first arrive. If they provide you with free accommodation of course you should be grateful! Be careful, Silverboy... You sound awfully entitled!

Free accommodation is a bonus, not a right. The problem is most people move to China expecting western style home comforts and complain bitterly when what they get doesn't match up to what they had imagined.

That's not to say all accommodation is acceptable. As I said in my review of EFDL, at EFTZ my colleague and I were once. expected to move in to a half finished apartment. We took one look at it, refused and complained to the owner, who put us up at a hotel for 3 nights while the work was completed. The apartments I had in Taizhou weren't all that luxurious, but they were free and so I won't complain about them. My apartment in Dalian was much nicer, but then I got to choose it myself and I received a housing allowance for the rent, another thing that was a nice perk of working in China.

I don't get free accommodation now I'm back in Europe. I have a wonderful apartment here in Spain and I had ocean views of Sicily when I lived in Italy... I was able to choose my own apartment and so they are much nicer than my free accommodation in China... But they also cost a large chunk of my salary each month... As is the same for every other adult in the world.