I've been going to China for more than a decade and lived there for a while too. I use the opportunities to practice my "street" Chinese and try to understand rural dialects. But I've never been taken in by any of the scams or folks coming up to me on the street. Worse is knowingly overpaying by 10-30rmb when buying something because I didn't want to haggle for ages.

I even take taxis from the taxi rank at the airport or train/bus station(instead of touts in the terminal/station), make a point of photographing or writing down the license plate number and pretending to text it to someone, so they know scamming or stealing from me won't work as well. Never really had a problem and try to make a game out of it, so its less of a chore.