Somewhere around 40,000 British people live in China, according to recent estimates.
They mainly live in big cities, like the capital Beijing, Shanghai, or Guangzhou.
Most expats enjoy a high standard of living in the country, with bigger salaries and a better work-life balance than they’d get at home.
Low transport prices and cheaper cost of living compared to the West often lure people in to enjoy a more luxurious lifestyle and greater financial freedom.
But one man, Paul Mosley, has lamented being so far from his native Britain.
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He is desperate to return to England, after a life spent working mostly in Beijing.
The 70-year-old told the Daily Telegraph that he yearns for “England’s green and pleasant land”.
There is just one catch: the fast-approaching threat of inheritance tax.
The tax is a 40 percent tax applied after a person dies to estates that are worth over £325,000 or more if the proceeds of the sale of a house are included.
Mr Mosley said: “We would consider it fair enough to succumb to UK taxes on our pensions and investments, as being a price worth paying, but there is no way my wife, upon her eventual demise, will donate 40pc of her assets to the Government for them to waste.”
By 2003, he was the general manager of a sustainable mining company in Beijing.
Ten years after being in China, Mr Mosley married locally. He and his wife, Xiaomo, have raised a bilingual family while he invested his earnings without the threat of capital gains tax.
Fearing that any money he left after his death would be taxed at the 40 percent rate, Mr Mosley, who is still domiciled in the UK, transferred his money to Xiaomo, now 63.
China has no inheritance tax laws. The only taxes that exist after death are ones to property. There is a wealth transfer fee that amounts to around 10 percent of a property’s value. Beneficiaries who sell an inherited house must pay 20 percent tax on the income.
Britain’s basic allowance for inheritance tax has been kept at £325,000 since 2009. Combined with a boom in house prices in the last decade, many ordinary families now find themselves at the basic level.
HMRC collected £7.1billion from inheritance tax receipts in the last year.
Writing in the Telegraph, former Chancellor Nadhim Zahawi, said: “Inheritance tax is that other spectre that haunts us alongside death.
“As well as being morally wrong to take someone’s assets on their death, it also creates all sorts of inefficient and damaging distortions in our personal finances and the wider economy.”
He is part of a group of MPs, which includes former Prime Minister Liz Truss, who want Mr Sunak to abolish the tax.
Mr Mosley and his wife own three properties in Beijing, one in England, and one in Portugal. He says Xiaomo will likely move to Britain once he dies, but fears she will be subject to the inheritance tax after she passes.
“By the time she dies, she could have been living in the UK for 15 years,” he said.
Bored of Beijing in retirement, he now wants to move to Kent to live out the rest of his years.
He said: “I don’t see anything wrong with paying income tax on pensions – that’s fair do’s. But if inheritance tax is going to keep us away then the UK doesn’t even get the other tax.”
