Raoul, you may be right that this is the way it's always been FOR FOREIGNERS, in which case I just happened to land in the only university that pays foreigners for all 12 months and wrongly assumed that was the norm, but there's a problem with your argument that it has to do with the academic year.

1) Chinese teachers are paid for all 12 months (and also have summers and the long Spring Festival winter holidays)!

Why do they get paid for 12 months and foreigners only for 10 if the reason is the academic calendar?

Often we'll hear about how much more we make than the Chinese teachers, but if you cut out 2 month's salary (or, more accurately, 2 of the twelves installments of one's yearly salary) we're not making much more.

The other problem with the "10 month contract," is, as you've mentioned, a teacher would then have to go two months without pay every year, and either travel or find housing for that period, if the teacher wanted to continue on as a teacher in a government school. The teacher would also quite likely have to switch up jobs frequently. The result would be the virtual elimination of experienced teachers, because the job only caters to those wanting to have a short adventure and then go home.

The procedure here is actually quite similar to American schools where teachers have summers off with pay. It's not that they are getting money for nothing, but merely that their pay is allocated evenly over the whole year so they don't have to seek other employment in the summer, which in a normal/healthy economy could easily lead to losing most teachers to other positions they'd need to find annually. Sooner or later they'd hit on something better than the teaching job. The equivalent of what some Chinese public schools are doing would be to have Chinese teachers come and teach in American schools, simply cut out their summer pay, and call it a day.

Obviously the 10 month contract is only aimed at foreigners, because a government job in China is pretty permanent for Chinese citizens, and thus a forced 2-month period of unemployment for every teacher, and a yearly need to find supplementary work would be unfeasible for the communist party.

Thus, it seems logical to conclude that the 10 month contract, in relation to the 12 month contract that all the Chinese teachers have, is a SCAM, however old or widespread it is.

The only way to get around this appears to be to sign up only for 6 month contracts and then renew them, so that the whole year is covered. So the next question is, if you can have two 6 month contracts, why can't you have one 12 month contract? Unless there's something called a "4 month contract," but I've never heard of that.

In the end, if one is only paid for 10 months, one should adjust one's salary down as in the chart I made, because one is being cheated out of @ 17% of one's yearly income, no matter how you slice it.