As part of ongoing efforts to attract and keep talents, Chinese governments and universities have initiated a series of reforms to improve faculty salaries over the past decades. However, the reformed salary policies do not work as well as expected. According to the field data, the formed salary policies had posted a new set of challenges to academics. On one hand, the salaries offered to academics remained low. Most junior academics could not live on their salaries. As a result, they actively tied themselves to the large-scale research projects headed by their senior peers to earn additional compensations, even at the cost of research interests and research qualities. On the other hand, the new remuneration policies created many potential conflicts among faculty members and significantly discouraged academic collaborations at the sample university. This made academics develop a new strategy--"one project with two separate teams"--to safeguard each others' benefits in collaborations. It is found that the reformed salary policies had served as impediments to academics' career development.