No, ya definitely shoulda been.
This ad is a perfectly fine example of one version of of a tactic commonly seen in job ads for China...and one that I have particularly come to hate.
It's this one: "The average Chinese person here lives on 1800 RMB a month. So see how generous our miserable 4000 RMB a month salary is? Why, you will live like a king here! Sure!"
There IS some element of truth to this. And therein lies some of the problem.
I live in a rich town. I know places here that routinely hire Ph.Ds for 4000 a month, and are turning people away. And these aren't mail-order Ph.Ds...these are REAL Ph.Ds in hard subjects that ya have ta do homework an' stuff.
Zhou Baijiu, the "average Chinese person" over at the ball bearing plant, DOES indeed get by on 2000 RMB a month. Often much less even than that.
Here's what they DON'T tell you.
Zhou Baijiu wakes up at 5, does his morning toilet, and eats a bowl of thin rice soup with a little pickled vegetable while sitting in the tiny kitchen of his tiny, cramped, poorly- or non-airconditioned 6th floor walkup apartment.
By 6, he's walking (or taking a 1-yuan bus) to meet his company shuttle bus for the 2-hour ride out to the sprawling factory where he works. There, after joining some mild exercises and repeating some exhortatory phrases bellowed at him from loudspeakers, he turns to his work of pushing a big red button when a light turns green, causing another batch of ball bearings to proceed from the Casting Area to the Annealing Area.
He bag production until 11ish, when it's off to the cafeteria for a company-subsidized dish of rice, stir-fried vegetables, and a bit of meat and/or fish.
After lunch, if he's at one of the cooler factories he gets an hour or so for a nice healthy snooze in a chair somewhere. Then, it's back to work.
At 5:30, he gets to clock out and climb back on the factory shuttle for the 2-hour ride back across the city to the stop nearest his home. Then it's the walk (or another city bus ride) back to the hacienda, and the 6-floor climb back up to his dingy, sweltering (or freezing), concrete warren of a home. Here, his bored, exhausted, bitter, neglected wife (who has herself just put in a similar day over at Number One People's Pharmaceutical Factory) and government-mandated One Child will join him for a dish of rice, stir-fried vegetables, and a bit of meat and/or fish.
Then, it's free time. There's a kung fu movie on CCTV-3. Or hey- Tonight Is Kinda Special, so he puts on his pajamas and heads downstairs out to the sidewalk with the home boys, to play cards and talk shit and drink enough baijiu to temporarily forget the long dull grey tube he exists within. (Meanwhile, we expats wonder why they all stare at us.)
By 10 o'clock it's off to bed. After a few moments of consort with his good lady wife (if she's not complaining about something again) he snoozes away in anticipation of doing the whole thing again tomorrow. He's lucky. He's got a good factory job and isn't out for 14 hours a day trying to scratch a living out of the agricultural countryside...or worse yet, a migrant worker sleeping in a plywood box near his construction site and fretting about whether the development company will try to rip him off on his annual paycheck.
Of course, it's not all toil and care. If the needs of the factory do not particularly require his presence, he has Sunday off. He's free to sleep in until 6am, pursue household matters with the wife, and take the government-mandated One Child out to the park and buy him a mylar "Hello Kitty" balloon. In February, May, and October, there are holidays- a few days in which his house will be stuffed with relatives and dumplings will be eaten.
Life is dull, but it's cheap...allowing the family to save up a down payment for a bigger box on a lower floor, and the looming school costs for the government-mandated One Child.
I don't care what ya saw in Mulan. This grim picture is something like daily reality for that "average Chinese person" in your new home city. Sound like fun?
I didn't think so. Yet this is the yardstick by which you are being asked to calibrate your prospects at Happy Luck Olympic California Fortune NBA English Academy.
You, my pretty....you can't live like this. You can't live anything remotely like this...you'll be barking mad and on the next plane back to Kansas faster than you can say 'Deluxe Whopper with Cheese'. And, I submit, you really didn't leave behind your dog and travel to the other side of the world in order to live anything remotely like this.
And, of course, you won't be asked to live like this. You'll have things a lot better...even on 4000 RMB a month.
The point being: the "average costs" you see trumpeted in job ads are utterly irrelevant to you. They take advantage of your ignorance of conditions here to make compensation packages seem better than they really are. What it will take to keep YOU sweet here is a highly personalized quantity that really depends on you, not upon how Zhou Baijiu lives.
Please don't let this one suck you in.