I was just in China again, this time in Beijing and Shanghai on vacation, and had a chance to talk to a college friend that's an expat there. The subject of being an expat in China comes up on a regional Asia expat forum I'm on as well, so I'll break form and try to stick to the thread topic.
To start, they don't have a lot of foreigners in some places in China. People would still take pictures with someone at the Beijing zoo just because they were white, for example. In a city like Shanghai (more international) I'd expect a lot less of that, but then the people taking the pictures were probably from the country anyway (a rural area).
Because of that the role of an expat might be a little different. Here in Thailand (where I live and work) they've moved on from caring much one way or the other about foreigners, so they'd just as soon not have them around unless they were useful for some reason. In China it can still be a symbol of internationally supported development, of being up to a Western standard, so someone could be there just to be white, for the image. At the most extreme they might even hire someone to act as an upper level employee for an event, but that would be an exception, a very rare thing.
The irony is that they aren't really behind America or the rest of the West in a lot of senses. I took a high speed train from Beijing to Shanghai and back that was the fastest in the world, 300 km / hr (200 mph give or take). They manufacture most of what America consumes, and Huawei has released a phone designed to compete with the IPhone 6, next year's phone. One can certainly argue they used reverse engineering and intellectual property theft to get where they are but then Western firms do the same for research, just probably not on the same scale, not to advance a country from behind to ahead in 20 years.
All of this should sound familiar, from Japan in the 70s. People loved to say they couldn't possibly develop their own technology, they just copied, up until American products were clearly inferior to Japanese ones.
China won't be as developed as Thailand in the sense of truly integrating Western culture anytime soon, which is ironic because it's a much more developed country in most other senses. The look of the cities isn't that different from America, and there is no shortage of modern cultural resources (malls, fast food, all the same electronics and services, etc.). A city like Shanghai has a dynamic look and feel to it and level of fast growth that you'd have trouble finding anywhere in the West.
Another irony is that China is importing those same general ideas from Japan as much as what Americans and Europeans see as the "West," but right now Japan and China aren't close friends due to territory conflicts, ownership of small islands and such, an issue Korea now also shares with Japan versus China.
My friend seemed to really like some aspects of Chinese culture and city life, and others less so, which is something expats in general seem to share, in my experience. Some make a habit of communicating mostly positive or negative things but in general the response is mixed; some things attract, some gaps can be annoying.
I've picked up a love of tea here, and that's another thing younger Chinese people might take up or completely leave behind, many switching to coffee. From where I stand that's a real shame because if you've never tried a decent Chinese oolong or green tea in a sense you really don't even know what tea is. So I finally did drift completely off topic; sorry about that.