What I meant by "comfortable Westerner" is that what you may consider insulting, they in China might be fine with. And it is presumptuous to think that they are

What I meant by "comfortable Westerner" is that what you may consider insulting, they in China might be fine with. And it is presumptuous to think that they are being exploited (and ungrateful for their jobs) just because Western standards are to have supersize and excess in everything like gas guzzling Hummers, McMansions, air conditioning in every room, etc. And someone from a developed country always has better options, so it is easy to say "they should not be taking that job" from up high. But when your main concern is your family, your child's education, and putting food on the table, any option is a good option. More so when you aren't concerned with luxury... because you can be more efficient and actually work for less when you don't waste money on extraneous living expenses. Plus, if you truly believe in a "global economy" where everyone is paid the same, the only way to move towards that is to enable free trade and allow cheap labor to be used. Holding back on an area because the wages are "too low" in fact drives wages there even lower, so that other exploitative people will be able to exploit this imbalance. So avoiding cheap labor doesn't make sense and causes exploitative wage reduction by artificially withholding demand, and paying more than market price doesn't make business sense. For example if I have three photographers. One charges $100/hr, the other $200/hr, and the third $300/hr. If I hire the first photographer I don't just decide to pay him $300 simply because the highest quote I received was $300. Not to mention paying market price is perfectly conducive with evening out the wages in a "global economy."