MOGANSHAN, China — MARK KITTO is still here. But he is leaving soon, he swears. It will happen sometime this summer, he said, after a final road trip with his family to the outer reaches of the Chinese empire, where two decades ago as a British soldier he joined a 59-day expedition to cross the Taklamakan Desert.

The furniture has already been removed from the home he rebuilt atop this bamboo-cloaked mountain three hours from Shanghai. And his Cantonese wife, Joanna Kitto, is handing day-to-day management of their restaurant and three atmospheric guesthouses to others.

Many foreigners in China think Mr. Kitto left the country last summer. But Mr. Kitto, 46, one of the better-known foreign entrepreneurs of his generation in China, is only now making good on the promise that he set forth in a provocative essay titled “You’ll Never Be Chinese.” It was published in August in Prospect, a British literary magazine, and it was Mr. Kitto’s farewell to a time when he made Shanghai and then Moganshan his adopted homes, all after being born Cornish, growing up in Wales, attending college in London and completing service in the Welsh Guards.

In the essay, he laid out why, after 16 years in this country, he would be heading back to his homeland. He wrote about the hardships of sustaining a business here, of a government that sacrifices the well-being of its people to stay in power and finally of very personal concerns over raising his two children, ages 8 and 10, in China.