I wish I could answer your questions. I keep asking them myself. I want to talk about it with someone local, but it's incredibly hard to find someone speaking English here outside work (and incredibly awkward to ask those questions at work), and my Chinese currently is limited to "hello", "thank you" and "goodbye" (I try to learn some as fast as I can; I only had a week's notice I'll be flying here so there wasn't time to prepare).

My Polish co-worker who is here with me and has been here before tells me of a girl working here who somehow escaped the poor villages far away from the metropolis and ended up working as a software tester. He says that he tried to talk with her about life, but that her English proficiency is limited to the technical matters; she can't express herself in English if asked about non-work topics, probably due to lack of general vocabulary.

I'll be happy to post something if I learn the answers to those questions.