China’s Digital Nomads Trade Mega-Cities for Backpacker Havens
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Tired of punishing 72-hour weeks, tech-savvy Chinese are choosing to work remotely in regional towns.
After a hard day's work, programmer Richard Hao powers down his laptop in a cafe overlooking Dali's picturesque lake and drinks in the view. Like a growing number of digital nomads in China, he's turned his back on big-city living and moved to the tourist hub in Yunnan province, famed for its snowcapped mountains, ancient temples and pagodas. “I'm working on a normal job with relatively fixed hours,” said Hao, who's employed by a technology firm in Shenzhen, a city of more than 17 million people about 1,800 kilometers (1,100 miles) to the southeast. “It's just that I don't have to go to an office and I have some fle...