Work pattern is generally 4on 2off. guaranteed 8 days a month off. can fly up to the legal limit of 100 hours a month in china but no more than 270 in a rolling 3 month period. also have the 1000 hours a year limit so i've heard the try to get you to average 80-85 actual hours a month. Shenzhen is nice and many expat communities and things to do. Nice shopping, eating, parks, expat wives club, western shops and restaurants and you are right next to hong kong. it's much cheaper than hong kong and you can get to hk many ways in just about an hour.
The jade guys all seem to be bailing right now. One of my chinese ground school instructors used to work there and even she admitted how messed up it was. heard they don't fly much and spend days overnight in undesirable places. right now i wouldn't put any hope or desire for that matter into upgrading there. there are even guys leaving there and coming to shenzhen
with the new contract there is no official commuting contract. they had it before and noone did it. officially 8 days a month off but i've heard they work with you if you want to try to pair some of those together though i have no official confrimation on that. as far as expat pilots go this is the place to be it seems with over 40 pilots from brazil, us, europe, south america, etc.
training...all i can say is welcome to china. they do things how they want, when they want and expect you to just go with the flow. you will take your caac type ride for the 737/a320 without any warm up sessions but if you are current should be fine..there was no oral. ground school so far has been a week of basic indoctrination of the gom, ops specs, mel, security, etc. we took a security test and a final exam over the rest of the subjects. the translations are bad in many cases so if you ask them enough that you don't understand the question they will just give you the answer. the tests are pretty much a group effort. we're supposed to do emergency training the week after next to include land and water evac procedures and go take a dip in the pool. after that we will get our work visa applications and start flying. you do a couple days of observation flights and then i'm told about 50 hours of ioe before they cut you loose. some of the routes they won't let the foreign pilots fly due to various reasons.
everyone has a different opinion on whether they like it or not or whether its tolerable or not. china is china and if you can deal with that you should do okay. have to remember it still is a communist country even if they have mcdonald's, kfc, starbucks, pizza hut, papa john's and wal-mart. on top of that their culture takes quite a bit of getting used to.