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Notes -
You're both dancing around the real issue IMO, which is not salary but research funding. If you offer a professor a million dollar research budget, access to the best students/postdocs and a $75,000 USD salary the vast majority would leap at the opportunity. Besides, there's always the option of commercializing your research and serving on boards and such in the USA.
In aggregate China spends quite a bit on research, but when you look at the actual grant size people are receiving it's quite low. Compare the US situation to Canada; in Canada most labs subsist on a single CIHR grant that awards less than 200k per year, and while the paylines (rates of success) for a single grant are higher, it's very hard to win multiple of the main CIHR grants. In the US, R01s (the bread and butter grant for a research lab) pays 400-500k per year and many people have multiple R01s, program grants, R21s and access to a huge amount of private and philanthropic capital. The same scenario plays out at the postdoc/PhD level; do you want access to that capital to do actual cutting edge work surrounded by the most motivated gunners in the world? Move to the US.
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