Well if you lived there for 3 years you have FAR more experience and data than I do. So I bow to your superior experience. This is why I titled the thing "i might be wrong".
Discussion
It seemed well researched. You should go see China.
all this talk about china is making me think a lot about mongolia... mongolia is one of my preferred locations, the high and dry and distant from the sea is unparalleled on the planet, and i briefly looked into immigration and language and both seem to be pretty easy
over the next 4 months i'm going to make a firm decision about this, but it's just reminding me that there is a lot of good things to say about the region in general, perhaps i would be actually better to go with somewhere in china with similar altitude, a lot of the west looks quite good too