I brought my wheel in China before I had my Chinese license. But there are safer ways.
1: Get a friend in a smaller town say Da Li in Yunnan to do it for you. You can drive any where in China with a license issued by any town in China. The benefits of doing this are that you are not under the jurisdiction of Beijing or Shanghai traffic police. You will not be deducted the points or even fined if you are caught in Beijing or Shanghai.
2: Take a written test and a road driving test. But since you have your US license, you do not need to go to 学习班（saving of 3000 RMB and a month of valuable time). I passed my written test after studying the rule book for 2- 3 hours. Here is a small story for my road test.
My driving experience includes driving a 25 feet Yellow truck from LA to middle west and over 100,000 miles on at least 30 different types of cars. But I failed my Chinese driving test simply because I did not "practice" with the official car in the test ground. Translation, I did not pay to "practice".
So, I spend 100 Yuan and 1/2 hour. I passed my road test.
