I think the Chinese have built up a genetic level immunity to certain things that would kill us laowai.  Things in my family are a little better but that is simply because my mother-in-law is a retired pediatrician and my wife works in the health industry.

But even with that I have to order them to cook things more every now and then.  Most of the time I just shake my head and let it slide.

mate..i studied medicine and i still did not find a reasonable answer for what you said........i want to post something useful here but the problem is that the science have no answer to that....one suggestion is that different people have different immunities and abilities......sorry if my answer did not help that much

I almost died from undercooked chicken eaten when visiting Shanghai.

Bloody bones...but because I was taken there by my hosts I felt obliged to eat it...busy popular restaurant too.

I really thought I was going to die...hit me about 30 hours later back in SZ.

Now I only eat chicken at home or at KFC or McD's.

I would rather eat deep fried or rubbery over-cooked chicken.

  This is something I was totally unaware of. The bones thing I was going to write about just yesterday as a matter of fact. When I eat I like to just chuck stuff in my mouth and not worry about getting a shard of bone stuck in the roof of my mouth. Kind of spoils the whole eating experience to some extent.

I don't believe Chinese have some mystical or enhanced immune system...

I think it's just simply a lack of proper education about the dangers of undercooked meat as well as some restaurants that are under-equipped to deal with the number of customers they get during peak hours..

At a fast food place here, they were serving some bloody chicken (literally) and I didn't know it until I came home with it as take-out (da bao).  

If you get served undercooked meat, simply don't eat it.   The Chinese don't put much faith into scientific facts.. They simply aren't educated enough to know that the inside of your body can be permanently hurt for the rest of your life simply because you ate the wrong food just one time.

The infection rate of Salmonella is actually very small and the people that die from it is just a very tiny tiny tiny fraction of the people who actually get infected with it.  So the probability of getting killed by Salmonila is nothing to getting run over by a car in China.

As far as gutter oil being so bad for you. In the short-term, it *REALLY* isn't.  The oil is cooked so hot that any bacteria or viruses in it are killed, for sure.. The only problem is that inside of that gutter oil, there are tons of other chemicals that don't cause immediate damage but will surely cause you to have kidney failure, cancer, or other very serious sicknesses later on in your life whether you're Chinese or not.   So you could theoretically eat gutter oil everyday for a very long time an not even feel the slightest bit sick until some years later when your kidneys fail or you get cancer.. Again, I think this is just a case of horribly bad education in China where the assumption is that if you don't get sick within a couple days then there was absolutely no problem with the food that you ate. I mean, there are plenty of Chinese out there that legitimately don't understand that recycling oil like that could be bad, even if it doesn't make you immediately sick after eating it. Same thing is true with the melamine in baby food and white rabbit candy, they think that because it doesn't make you sick within a few days then your body can handle it, no problem.. Which unfortunately is not true according to Scientific Facts..

My coworker went to China for just a few weeks and he got very very sick from eating Sushi in China.  He ended up taking an emergency plane back to the USA and spending a week in the hospital.   Thankfully, other than a few cases of nasty diarrhea  I haven't gotten seriously sick in China and I've been here about 5 months.

Of course, I think I also have a kick-ass girlfriend to thank for me not becoming horribly sick... As she does a good job at making sure I don't eat too many unhealthy things and I only eat at places she thinks are ok...

I've seen salmonella in large cats. It turned either the kidney or liver white(can't remember). The cat died.

 The lack of sanitation in China is awful. They cut meat, handle money, often putting a dirty cash box on the cutting surface, all without washing their hands. When they cut meat without deboning it, to me this is lazy, but I think the Chinese are just more laid back in somethings. If it's not something different that they can stare at, then it doesn't matter.

Chickety China the Chinese Chicken.

You have a drumstick and your brain starts tickin'......

Had to write this just to get the song outta my head.  It's all I can think about since I started reading this.