[endogui]

It seems that GDP should only tell part of the story with respect to specialist incomes. A senior engineer in the US will have their salary and contribution diminished by regulatory requirements and business inefficiencies, and will lose a lot of their potential compensation to health insurance, investor compensation, and other rent-seeking. In China, someone with a skill the Party has designated as critical to national goals may have a lot of the bureaucracy and bullshit cleared for them, or may be offered zero-interest loans to develop their business. Or perhaps not... I have no experience here, but GDP is a terrible metric for how much opportunity is available to skilled engineers.

Furthermore, compensation for technically skilled individuals is significantly lower in the rest of the world than in the US: visa barriers are definitely holding US tech salaries up. Although China has even stronger restrictions on foreigners, for those who can get into China but not the US it may be a good deal.