When the best job Mikala Reasbeck could find after college in Boston was counting pills part-time in a drugstore for US$7 an hour, she took the drastic step of jumping on a plane to Beijing in February to look for work.

A week after she started looking, the 23-year-old from Wheeling, West Virginia, had a full-time job teaching English.

"I applied for jobs all over the United States. There just weren't any," said Reasbeck, who speaks no Chinese but had volunteered at the 2008 Beijing Olympics.

In China, she said: "the jobs are so easy to find. And there are so many."

Young foreigners like Reasbeck are coming to China to look for work in its unfamiliar but less bleak economy, driven by the worst job markets in decades in the US, Europe and some Asian countries.

Many do basic work such as teaching English, a service in demand from Chinese businesspeople and students. But a growing number are arriving with skills and experience in computers, finance and other fields.

"China is really the land of opportunity now, compared to their home countries," said Chris Watkins, an official with headhunting firm MRI China Group. "This includes college graduates as well as maybe more established businesspeople, entrepreneurs and executives from companies around the world."

Watkins said the number of resumes his company received from abroad has tripled over more than 18 months.

China's job market has been propped up by the government's 4-trillion-yuan (US$586-billion) stimulus, which helped to boost growth to 7.9 percent from a year earlier in the quarter that ended on June 30, up 6.1 percent from the previous quarter.

Some 217,000 foreigners held work permits in China at the end of 2008, up from 210,000 a year earlier, according to the National Bureau of Statistics. Thousands more use temporary business visas and go abroad regularly to renew them.

Reasbeck said it took her two months to find the drugstore job after she graduated from Boston's Emerson College with a degree in writing, literature and publishing. She said she applied to as many as 50 employers nationwide.

(Shanghai Daily October 1, 2009)