Hangzhouculture & etiquette

Article 39 of the Exit and Entry Administration Law requires anyone staying somewhere other than a hotel to register with the local public security organ within 24 hours of arrival. Hotels file it invisibly; private landlords do not. Take passport, visa, lease and landlord to the neighbourhood station and keep the slip, because it is requested again at your residence permit application and at every renewal. The fine is up to RMB 2,000, but the real cost is being blocked at a counter later when you cannot produce it.

A Z visa gets you through the border and expires. Within 30 days of arrival you must apply to the Hangzhou Public Security Bureau's Exit–Entry Administration for a foreigner's residence permit, having first collected the physical work permit card, usually expected within about fifteen days of entry. Employers here are generally well drilled, particularly the large tech companies, but the legal deadline attaches to you rather than to HR.

Shenzhen builds things; Hangzhou writes them. Alibaba, Ant Group, NetEase's games division, Hikvision and Dahua in Binjiang, and the cluster of young AI and robotics companies that emerged into national prominence in 2025 — DeepSeek, Unitree, Game Science and others — make this a genuinely different labour market from the Pearl River Delta. It also has a particular working culture: the '996' debate, twelve-hour days six days a week, was crystallised by public comments from Alibaba's founder, and while formally such schedules breach Chinese labour law and courts have said so, the informal expectation in parts of this industry has not vanished. Ask about actual hours at interview, not just about the contract.

West Lake was inscribed by UNESCO in 2011 as a cultural landscape, and the protection is not decorative — it constrains building heights and development in a substantial buffer around the lake, which is why the area west of the city centre has no towers and why the skyline sits across the river in Qianjiang New City instead. The practical consequences are that housing near the lake is old, low, scarce and extremely expensive; that new-build supply is pushed outward; and that a lake view is a permanent asset rather than something the next development will block.

Alibaba's main campuses sit in Yuhang's Future Sci-Tech City, well to the west and north-west of the historic centre, and a large part of the tech industry has followed. West Lake district is between the two, Binjiang's hardware and software cluster is south across the river, and the old downtown is east of the lake. A commute from a lakeside flat to a Yuhang campus can run over an hour; a flat in Yuhang puts you in new-build suburbia with a fifteen-minute walk to work. Most people get this trade-off wrong once.

Hangzhou sits in the Yangtze delta furnace belt — long, still, extremely humid summers where 38°C with high humidity is normal for weeks. The plum rain season in June saturates everything. Winter is short but damp and hovers near freezing, and like everywhere south of the Huai river, buildings have no central heating; you will heat one room with a reverse-cycle air conditioner. Spring and autumn are genuinely beautiful and genuinely brief.