Beijing has an active tech startup scene. There are a number of startups, both expat and local. I know of startups doing games, social media, kids books, 3D p

Beijing has an active tech startup scene. There are a number of startups, both expat and local. I know of startups doing games, social media, kids books, 3D printing, and advertising. There are a number of meetups, and regular BarCamp Beijing meetings. From what I hear, starting a company takes about 6 months of pain, but once that's over and you are capitalized with 100k RMB, you get a pretty guaranteed Z visa, so once you get started, it goes fairly smoothly. However, my personal feeling is that there are two kinds of opportunity in China. The first is the expat market, also companies wanting to expand to China. This is large enough to be comfortable (at least in Beijing). The second is the larger Chinese market, which is where everyone starts seeing money trees. My opinion is that the "opportunity" in the Chinese market only exists for those who are functionally fluent in Chinese, have a solid grasp of the culture, why people do the things they do, what motivates them. This would mostly be local Chinese, or American-born Chinese (or equivalent) with parents from China or Taiwan. A white expat has a nice market in other expats, but Chinese values and habits and their expression is very different from what white expats' default thinking is. And then, of course, there's the issue that if you upset any apple carts with "disruptive" startups, the owners of the apple carts might exercise some of their guanxi, which means you'd better have some stronger guanxi. You can imagine how good the guanxi-fu of foreigners is.