Software salaries in both places are also a lot lower.

Yeah but for companies as Ali and Tencent you can have lucrative salaries.

If you end up working for Chinese companies for semiconductor activities (or other sensitive areas), you'll probably get blacklisted by western companies and never be able to work in the west again, which has way higher salaries. They'll think you are trying to steal sensitive tech, like the recent theft from Chinese employees against Apple and ASML.

Also, with the US tech sanctions getting tighter and tighter around China, tons of failures are occurring. Oppo just shut down their chip design unit. Alibaba has had 20,000 layoffs. Massive semiconductor scams in China have recently brought into light, such as china's champion HSMC. https://asia.nikkei.com/Business/36Kr-KrASIA/Semiconductor-f.... China has basically had no luck in semiconductor progress, while it's economy is collapsing.

And really, at this point, you would be willingly working for a dictatorship that seeks to destroy the democratic countries and enslave its own Chinese citizens. Very few immoral engineers would sign up for that.

> while it's economy is collapsing.

Huh? Funny how 1/5 of the world economy can collapse and it's not even noticable.

According to the office for national statistics in China, for jan/feb of 2023 http://www.ce.cn/xwzx/gnsz/gdxw/202303/27/t20230327_38464161..., car manufacturing profits is down 41%. non-metal products manufacturing profits is down 39%. chemicals manufacturing profits is down 56%. electronics manufacturing profits is down 71%!! In fact, all businesses have dropped 22% in profit. Not to mention the 1M+ SMB that failed in the last 2 years.

1 in 5 Young Chinese Is Jobless, and Millions More Are About to Graduate https://www.nytimes.com/2023/05/19/business/china-youth-unem...

China’s shipping containers pile up at overcrowded port as overseas orders dwindle https://www.scmp.com/economy/china-economy/article/3210870/c...

China to raise retirement age to deal with aging population https://www.reuters.com/world/china/china-raise-retirement-a...

Guizhou Province may become the first provincial government to go bankrupt in China. https://twitter.com/tankman2002/status/1646905359184044032?l...

Didn't profits boom during Covid? They have to come down as things normalize. Also, profit down 50% still means you're profitable so I wouldn't call that "collapse". The Chinese GDP is expected to grow by >5% this year.

The global economy is strained. But especially in Europe because of the shock of the Ukraine war.

Intel's profit is down 100+%

US government is set to default on their debt.

US banks are failing left and right.

If you just take sensationalist headlines at face value you'd conclude that the US economy has already collapsed.