A postdoc anywhere is unlikely to help you get an industry job. It is also likely to pay less than an industry job. If you want an industry job, why would you accept a postdoc job?

Welcome to Academia.SE. It might be worth narrowing the scope a bit -- as you say, career advice for employers outside the R&D sector is not really our area; same for general cultural differences. But, a question about how a Chinese math post-doc would differ from the same position "in the West" might be interesting.

@AnonymousPhysicist Because I've been unemployed for nearly a year, I'm in debt and I have to pay my bills. I'm hoping this will give me some time to develop skills for industry and it will give me at least some money to pay off my bills.

Honestly, they are probably more interested in your name and school than anything else you provide. Having US educated people working at their university is still a sign of quality to them.

How many other international postdocs are at the same school and can you cold email any of them you're even tenuously connected to to ask how it's going?

@FourierFlux My (potential) postdoc advisor knows my PhD advisor (who is well-known in his field). I'm sure his recommendation went a long way in my application. If what you say is the case, is it a good decision to take it if I was going into industry (or academia for that matter)?

@Libor There are none. That was my first thought.

Do you want to stay in china permanently? I can think of no other reason you'd even consider this.

"Given that I've never left the US, how big of a culture shock with this be?" Can you speak Chinese? I'm guessing the answer is "no", given how you talk about how you've only left your home state, but I guess it's possible that you're Chinese-American.

Please read the question Postdoc in China: what are the possible difficulties and disadvantages?. I am a native Chinese speaker living in Taiwan. In my opinion, this question is extremely important to you.

"I'm told that it's a pretty international city". If by international you mean multicutural, then you should definitely adjust your expectations. The vast majority of people you will meet anywhere in China (even the big cities) will be Chinese. Also, outside of good hotels you can expect the level of spoken English to be basically zero. To get by you either need to rely on Google translate, or (better) learn some Chinese. I have found that even having some basic Chinese (~ HSK 3 in my case) makes a big difference for daily routine.

you either need to rely on Google translate Can you use Google in China? If you can, that's a news to me.

@scaaahu Not without a VPN, no. With a VPN, yes. Having a VPN is basically compulsory if you want the internet to work properly in China. Google Translate also has an offline mode which you can install in advance.

I don't think this deserves an answer so I ll put it as a comment. It seems to me if you are not truly keen to learn about China's culture (as in this will be a great life experience and I will focus on the positive aspects of things and ignore the rest), it does not make much sense to go. I speak with the experience of recurrent sabbaticals in Korea where I also witnessed that of western postdocs in Seoul. Most of them loved it but had this preconception.

These are really quite different questions. I'd kindly suggest splitting it into at least two questions, one focussing on the potential cultural shock of moving to China. This is a wonderful answer to the latter though academia.stackexchange.com/a/67266/30639

There's almost a 3rd question, too, about how to find an industry job...especially how far afield can you go (in industry) from what you want your ultimate job to be, and still be on a clear path to getting there.

From personal experience (therefore add grain of salt), a good predictor for whether I experience culture shock seems to be how excited I am about the potential move. Moves that went well were always preceded with a lot of excitement -- even if I didn't know much about the culture I was moving into, I was excited about the possibilities. Moves that didn't go well were preceded with dread, and a feeling of doing this out of necessity.

I think part of the reason for this correlation is because feeling excited (or not) reflected my own psychological readiness, and how much emotional energy I would have for overcoming obstacles, establishing a support network in the new place. My own worst culture shock came after a move to a (western) country with culture very similar to the place I grew up in. It just came at a bad point in my life when I wasn't willing to adjust even small details of my life.

I know people in industry who are hiring (and paying well). Let me know if this could perhaps interest you.

I'm here because I have strong opinions on the China post-doc question but I don't think I have anything to add there that hasn't already been said, so now I'm here to just let it all out in this chat.

Get ready, because here it comes!

I think the Chinese aspect of the question is a rounding error in the considerations of any future data science employer compared to the track of the career history. I think the question should revolve around why are you doing a post doc if your plans are to go in to industry. It honestly sounds like you are secretly hoping to stay in academia and justifying it by saying you are buffing your DS skills where really this isn't going to help that much beyond what you've already done with the PhD.

I mean you can improve your skills while doing a post doc, but you won't be improving them as much in the DS direction as you would have if you had simply done in to industry now.

The main thing that PhDs and other academics need to enter industry is emotional intelligence, like how to interview and how to understand your prospective employers and clients and then how to translate between business problems and whatever technical solution you may come up with.

Don't forget that often a simple solution is more robust and easier to implement than a complex solution.

Funny thing about that, people with more academic experience are better at creating simpler solutions than people with less academic experience.