No sour grapes here just the facts,it is important to consider a few things: depending on where you are from, the flight allowance will only cover about 60-70% of the actual cost of getting home and getting back each year; the health insurance is extremely limited and some teachers pay out of pocket for medical care or for better insurance; the housing allowance is only 2000 RMB but most teachers pay 3000-4000 RMB per month for rent + required property management fee (this is not including utilities and internet); if you have kids at the school, you get a big discount, but still have to pay a substantial amount for what will most likely be education that is not suitable for expat kids anyway (most classes are taught in Chinese, and this includes the "international" section, so you better hope your kids can understand Chinese immediately). These (and several other) reasons are why the net salary is much lower than you first realize, especially when you compare it to the salary and benefits of other international schools in China. The school could easily fix this in so many ways. For example, simply increasing the housing allowance while decreasing the gross salary by perhaps 2000 RMB per month, and sending part of our salary to our foreign bank accounts untaxed (like some schools do) would save us about 5000 RMB or more in taxes per month as well as a half day of errands and high bank fees to transfer money home. CGS solution to this was to simply lower all the teachers salary,and hire unqualified backpackers to do so.Some schools (typical in Shanghai) will reduce your taxes if you submit receipts for various things, but not here (not sure if the school doesn't want to or just doesn't know how, or what).

Here are some of the other disadvantages:

1. The location is very isolated and transportation is difficult to the city. From the school gate to the center of the city involves at least 2 buses and maybe a metro ride for a total of almost 2 hours including the waiting. Late at night the buses stop and then you have to rely on "black taxis" who will charge 3 or 4 times the normal taxi rate. Many metered taxis refuse to come here since it is out of their area, or else they want a much higher price instead of using the meter. I would not suggest this school for young singles expecting to have a dating life as it hard to meet anybody outside the school who would be a suitable match unless one of you travels 2 hours each way so you can see each other.

2. The administration structure is very inefficient and you will have too many bosses that each have different expectations. Depending on which section you are in, you will have a high school Chinese principal (who cannot even speak English even though he has direct authority over us and makes us come to his meetings), a high school international principal (who is more like a vice-principal since his authority is limited and often trumped by the Chinese principal), an MYP principal (not sure why he isn't just the middle school principal since his authority seems to overlap part of the high school principal's the way it is set up now), a subject group leader (department head, who may manage you very directly or may rarely talk to you depending on which department), a program group leader (we have many programs including IGCSE, A-level, AP, MYP, DP, IFY, and more, and you will likely be assigned to more than one program and thus have two different leaders each wanting different things), a section leader, and others who will exert authority over you and want you to attend various meetings at some point. It can be very difficult to do your job and keep all of these people happy simultaneously since they care about different things. If you get along well with five or six of these leaders but have a disagreement with just one of them, then your life will become miserable very quickly. This resulted in a few teachers quitting early or being fired, and all of them lost a serious amount of money because of not getting their last month (or two) of salary, losing their apartment security deposit, loss of many items purchased for their apartment but were too big to take home, cost of flight home, and probably a couple months without salary until starting a new job). I thought of describing a few of these stories here to give good examples, but then this would be too long and maybe violate someone's privacy).

3. The school will expect you to follow every detail of the contract, but the administration will not follow their side and will add in contract terms and claim they were there all along. For example, in the first week, we were told we would have to attend 2 hours meetings in the late evening every week, even though this was not in the contract and was never mentioned before coming here. Also, many teachers were told they would teach specific classes, and then found out upon arrival that they would be teaching completely different classes. Some teachers were so upset that they wanted to quit and leave right then, but we all had to turn our passports into FAO and had to wait about a few more weeks to get them back, so leaving was impossible. Then later there were teachers who threatened to be fired and/or have their salary docked for not being on campus for at 40 hours per week, even though our contracts do not require that. The contract states we have office hours 9:30-11:30 am and 2:30 -4:30 pm, but does not say we have to work 40 hours per week. I was personally very angry about this since I had other job offers before I accepted this job, and would have never accepted a teaching job which requires 40 hours per week on campus (this does not even consider the amount of time you work from home), and actually checks it by making you scan your ID to enter or exit the campus. If you don't scan it on the way in or out (which is easy to do), then someone can claim you were never there (even though you may have 100 witnesses). In all fairness, the new contract for next year does clearly state these requirements, and so I made a choice not to renew my contract because of this.No sour grapes here just the facts.