Housing is assigned by the Embassy Housing Committee. The Embassy rents/owns and maintains several apartments in the city. They are fully renovated to Western standards and located about 5 to 45 minutes from the Embassy.  Employees travel to work via public transportation (metro, trolley, bus, etc.), walking, or in their personally owned vehicles.  Some employees choose to purchase a vehicle when they arrive at to post.

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In the City

Beijing, sometimes romanized as Peking, is the capital of the People's Republic of China and one of the most populous cities in the world. The population as of 2021 was 21,333,332. The metropolis, located in northern China, is governed as a direct-controlled municipality under the national government, with 14 urban and suburban districts and two rural counties. Beijing Municipality is surrounded by Hebei Province with the exception of a neighboring Tianjin Municipality to the southeast.

Beijing is the second largest Chinese city by urban population after Shanghai and is the nation's political, cultural, and educational center. It is home to the headquarters of most of China's largest state-owned companies and is a major hub of the national highway, expressway, railway, and high-speed rail networks. The Beijing Capital International Airport is the second busiest in the world by passenger traffic.

Military contractors have played a critical role in building infrastructure, maintaining aircraft, and providing security or medical care in combat zones over the past decade and a half but some members of Congress say the time has come to give those jobs back to military personnel ...and some retired generals agree.

Troops' skill sets and training time are waning because of the "complex and costly approach" to keeping contractors in such places as Iraq and Afghanistan, while military assets are shuffled to other locations for a quick temporary duty assignment with no gain.

It takes about 500 to 600 civilian contract personnel to maintain "a brigade's worth of aircraft" at about $100 million a year.

Between 2001 and 2021 the U.S. spent around $5 trillion on contractors in Iraq and Afghanistan with proved to provide strategic gains. The missions contractors' support became a lot more difficult to measure "at the granular level,".

Military contractors have had a great reputation in terms of responsiveness, but some have had some bad experiences in terms of flexibility.

The contractor issue is one that deserves lots of studies… and in my view, there is an absolutely appropriate role for contractors in combat theaters" in lieu of a uniform capability. I would not discount their role in a wide variety of functions.

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