I'm currently operating in Manila. Low cost of living. Extremely cheap local labor (hiring system admins for about USD$5k per year). People speak English well. Very American-ized environment, so minimal culture shock. There's a growing call center culture here, so bandwidth is pretty reliable. VC community is small but active. Manila lacks a big talent pool of software engineers. We've been experimenting with setting up an office in India as well to remedy that problem.

I was in Beijing for about 6 months. I would not recommend that unless you either (a) speak Mandarin fluently or (b) plan on staying there for the long haul. Engineers were highest quality I've seen though.