Well, I'll pioneer by saying that I'm a token white face in a company founded by a great friend of mine (1st Gen. Chinese American, mad guanxi net), they need certain Waiguo tech expert to secure certain government subsidies, but no real expert with the tiniest amount of self-respect would work for the salary they offered... so here I am.
What I bring home is a rather complicated issue since I don't really wanna upset the folks down in IR fucking S too much and I understand I'm not even small time, I'm nobody, but if I piss off someone and he tip them, the IRS bunch could put some real hurt on me, so I let certain company full of part-timers working for 7.5 bucks an hour crunch my numbers for me.
I can give you this: Any college puke fresh out of school that got recruited by super giants like google or hp can easily blow me away with their awesome paychecks. But living in China has its fair share of perks, namely:
You are a fucking star here. People look up to you. You are somebody that nobody really knows. And that feels awesome.
You can say all sorts of inappropriate things to ladies here and it would be OK. They assume you are xi fang ren, and that's how westerners behave, so they'll give you a pass and let you slide. Like this one time I met this really cute, 27 year oldish environmental scientist... I typed a lot but deleted it since nobody really wanna know. Meh. In America you could be dealing with bear maces, police officers or worst of all, lawsuits. But be careful pushing things too far though.
You make much less, yet you get to save more. That is, if you are into saving. That's great too. Oh, and the partial reason you get to save more is because life here really is... boooooooooooooooring. 3000 kuai a chopper ride from Shenzhen to Zhuhai is the fanciest stuff you can get in China.
Other small stuff... like cheap as crap cab fare, mobile payment etc. But anything of decent quality is gonna cost ya. Hey, it's a third world, remember?
I'm a avid researcher and critique (self-proclaimed) of the Chinese culture. Knowing a different culture to its core helps you put a lot of things into perspective. You get to compare cultures side by side, and knowledge is a wonderful thing.
the downside is that you got watch out for Stockholm Syndrome and an overall deterioration in civility. I actually lost the ability to hold doors for people and apologize to pedestrians I ran into because I've been here for tu lang.