There's some truth in all of the above, but can we blame Aston English School or Western management for the problems the OP wrote about Ankang Aston? Aston is only cupable to the degree they knowingly allow greedy business people to exploit the teachers that they recruit from overseas.

I also agree that a lot of foreign managers are not at all qualified to exercise power over teachers. They only need to have completed 6 months of teaching to be eligible to be a manager at Aston, and, as one poster stated, the standard for eligibility could be complicity with Chinese management rather than ability to manage.

While foreign managers can be bad, it sounds worse to work directly for an ace whole franchisee with no one in between as a buffer.

But if you do find yourself in a situation where you work for a jerk, you can tell yourself that you are experiencing the real China from the recieving end, where it hurts.

How many tourists can say that?