Back when I worked in China, avoiding taxes was super common. I even received SMS spam advertising consultancy to companies about how to avoid them. The company I worked in wired my salary in multiples bank transfers from different accounts. The after taxes salary ended up only 1-2% less than the one before taxes because the declared&taxed income was just around 1000$. The bank never asked questions.

In China, companies are in charge of paying the income taxes for you but they usually have the means to dodge it, and the workers are complacent since they benefit from it too.

If China starts cracking down on it, lots of Chinese with high leveraged mortgages (up to 70% of their income sometimes) will be in trouble.