Beijing is counting on ‘sea turtles’ to help retool the country’s economy and boost growth
By DAVID PIERSON AND DON LEE 26 February 2009
Xun Jia, a doctoral candidate in theoretical physics at the University of California, Los Angeles, expected to find a job on Wall Street crunching complex financial formulas upon his graduation. But after meeting 10 recruiters to no avail, the Chinese native is looking for new opportunities - in the country he left behind.
‘I’m definitely considering moving back,’ said Mr. Jia, 27, who always envisioned himself establishing a career in the United States first but is now firing off his resume to contacts in China. ‘They need people to go back.’
The Chinese government is counting on people like Mr. Jia - nicknamed ‘sea turtles’ because they journeyed across the ocean and then came back - to help retool its economy and find paths to expansion beyond the exports on which the country has relied for so many years.
Late in 2008, the government launched an aggressive campaign to lure them back and is spending millions to entice accomplished investors, bankers, researchers and engineers to come home.
During a 10-day series of global job fairs in December, Chinese banks, universities and government agencies interviewed more than 4,400 people in London, Chicago and New York.
The southern city of Guangzhou has created a US$30 million fund to attract overseas financial professionals and, along with the city of Shenzhen, is considering a multi-city US recruitment tour this summer.
The economic boom that lit up China in the past decade already had served as a beacon to many expatriates, drawing thousands home from the US and other places.
In 2008, a record 50,000 Chinese students who studied abroad returned to China, an increase of 6,000 from 2007 and more than double the number in 2004, according to Chinese government statistics.
In Shanghai, about 4,000 businesses are said to have been started by returned students, amounting to more than US$500 million in investment, Chinese state media have reported.
Charles Zhang, Internet tycoon and the founder of one of China’s largest Internet portals, Sohu.com, was educated at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. At the prestigious Chinese Academy of Sciences, 80 per cent of the faculty studied abroad, as did more than half of those at the Chinese Academy of Engineering.
‘You can find most things you were used to in the US in Shanghai now,’ said Greg Ye, a graduate of Harvard Business School who returned to found NewMargin Venture, a private equity fund. ‘I feel like there’s lots more opportunity here.’
With the global recession slowing the economy to levels last seen in 2002, the Chinese government wants even more of those living abroad to come home in the next few years.
High interest
‘They want to send a positive message that the government is forward-thinking’ by looking overseas for help, said Clay Dube, associate director of the US-China Institute at the University of Southern California (USC). ‘That’s the political and public relations side of it. Then there’s a real recognition that moving forward, you’re going to need these folks.’
Senior executives in Shanghai’s financial industry said the interest was so high that they carried back 150kg of resumes from the job fairs.
Although it’s unclear how successful the recruiting campaign will be, financial companies in Shanghai recently offered jobs to 53 candidates as a result of the fairs, according to Caijing, an influential Chinese business magazine.
State media also reported that Chinese carmaker Futian is eyeing laid-off workers in Detroit, hoping to hire about 10 specialists in research and development, production and sales. The confidence with which China is courting its diaspora reflects the vastly changed attitudes about the country’s prospects since the economy started to flourish in the 1990s.
In earlier years, many Chinese students preferred to stay overseas while China was struggling to transition out of a state-dominated economy. A generation of students in the US were helped along by the asylum granted them after the Tiananmen Square crackdown of 1989. But with China’s economic boom, the idea of moving back became increasingly palatable and, in many cases, attractive to the ambitious.
Multinational corporations opened offices, entrepreneurs broke ground and living standards soared in the metropolitan areas along the Chinese coast. ‘The younger generation has no hesitation going back,’ said Henry Zhang of the Chinese Finance Association, which helped organise a recent recruitment fair in New York. ‘I think it’s a permanent shift.’
Mr. Zhang is part of the older generation. He left China to study physics at the University of Texas, Austin in 1989 carrying all of US$245. He knew that heading to the US and staying there offered him the most opportunity.
‘Before, you would go to America and never look back,’ said Mr. Zhang, 45. ‘You had no regrets. You just had to march forward.’ Now, Mr. Zhang says he has the best of both worlds.
Shanghai, the primary destination for returning sea turtles, is looking to seize opportunities created by the global downturn to build an international financial centre rivalling Hong Kong and Singapore.
A regular feature
Recruiting events now occur regularly. In a low-key affair at the end of December, a group of sea turtles invited 65 people from overseas to spend two days at a Marriott hotel in the Pudong district, China’s financial hub and home to Shanghai’s stock exchanges. The event was supported by the Pudong government and gave bank executives and agency officials a chance to mingle with people like Will Lu, who works for a merchant banking company out of Los Angeles.
The 34-year-old native of Shanghai, who graduated from USC’s Marshall School of Business, says he was there to network with key people in government and business. ‘As in Wall Street, you have to know someone to get into the industry,’ he said. The Pudong event was Mr. Lu’s third such recruiting session in China in a month. The others were in Beijing and Guangzhou.
When Mr. Lu left China in 2001, he remembers, he and his friends were drawn to the US and its opportunities. That attraction is still there, he says, but the financial crisis has accelerated a shift to the East.
‘The focusing point of the world,’ he said, ‘will be changing to China.’
Staff writers David Pierson reported from Los Angeles and Don Lee from Shanghai. -- LAT-WP
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China lures skilled workers back home
Beijing is counting on ‘sea turtles’ to help retool the country’s economy and boost growth
By DAVID PIERSON AND DON LEE
26 February 2009
Xun Jia, a doctoral candidate in theoretical physics at the University of California, Los Angeles, expected to find a job on Wall Street crunching complex financial formulas upon his graduation. But after meeting 10 recruiters to no avail, the Chinese native is looking for new opportunities - in the country he left behind.
‘I’m definitely considering moving back,’ said Mr. Jia, 27, who always envisioned himself establishing a career in the United States first but is now firing off his resume to contacts in China. ‘They need people to go back.’
The Chinese government is counting on people like Mr. Jia - nicknamed ‘sea turtles’ because they journeyed across the ocean and then came back - to help retool its economy and find paths to expansion beyond the exports on which the country has relied for so many years.
Late in 2008, the government launched an aggressive campaign to lure them back and is spending millions to entice accomplished investors, bankers, researchers and engineers to come home.
During a 10-day series of global job fairs in December, Chinese banks, universities and government agencies interviewed more than 4,400 people in London, Chicago and New York.
The southern city of Guangzhou has created a US$30 million fund to attract overseas financial professionals and, along with the city of Shenzhen, is considering a multi-city US recruitment tour this summer.
The economic boom that lit up China in the past decade already had served as a beacon to many expatriates, drawing thousands home from the US and other places.
In 2008, a record 50,000 Chinese students who studied abroad returned to China, an increase of 6,000 from 2007 and more than double the number in 2004, according to Chinese government statistics.
In Shanghai, about 4,000 businesses are said to have been started by returned students, amounting to more than US$500 million in investment, Chinese state media have reported.
Charles Zhang, Internet tycoon and the founder of one of China’s largest Internet portals, Sohu.com, was educated at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. At the prestigious Chinese Academy of Sciences, 80 per cent of the faculty studied abroad, as did more than half of those at the Chinese Academy of Engineering.
‘You can find most things you were used to in the US in Shanghai now,’ said Greg Ye, a graduate of Harvard Business School who returned to found NewMargin Venture, a private equity fund. ‘I feel like there’s lots more opportunity here.’
With the global recession slowing the economy to levels last seen in 2002, the Chinese government wants even more of those living abroad to come home in the next few years.
High interest
‘They want to send a positive message that the government is forward-thinking’ by looking overseas for help, said Clay Dube, associate director of the US-China Institute at the University of Southern California (USC). ‘That’s the political and public relations side of it. Then there’s a real recognition that moving forward, you’re going to need these folks.’
Senior executives in Shanghai’s financial industry said the interest was so high that they carried back 150kg of resumes from the job fairs.
Although it’s unclear how successful the recruiting campaign will be, financial companies in Shanghai recently offered jobs to 53 candidates as a result of the fairs, according to Caijing, an influential Chinese business magazine.
State media also reported that Chinese carmaker Futian is eyeing laid-off workers in Detroit, hoping to hire about 10 specialists in research and development, production and sales. The confidence with which China is courting its diaspora reflects the vastly changed attitudes about the country’s prospects since the economy started to flourish in the 1990s.
In earlier years, many Chinese students preferred to stay overseas while China was struggling to transition out of a state-dominated economy. A generation of students in the US were helped along by the asylum granted them after the Tiananmen Square crackdown of 1989. But with China’s economic boom, the idea of moving back became increasingly palatable and, in many cases, attractive to the ambitious.
Multinational corporations opened offices, entrepreneurs broke ground and living standards soared in the metropolitan areas along the Chinese coast. ‘The younger generation has no hesitation going back,’ said Henry Zhang of the Chinese Finance Association, which helped organise a recent recruitment fair in New York. ‘I think it’s a permanent shift.’
Mr. Zhang is part of the older generation. He left China to study physics at the University of Texas, Austin in 1989 carrying all of US$245. He knew that heading to the US and staying there offered him the most opportunity.
‘Before, you would go to America and never look back,’ said Mr. Zhang, 45. ‘You had no regrets. You just had to march forward.’ Now, Mr. Zhang says he has the best of both worlds.
Shanghai, the primary destination for returning sea turtles, is looking to seize opportunities created by the global downturn to build an international financial centre rivalling Hong Kong and Singapore.
A regular feature
Recruiting events now occur regularly. In a low-key affair at the end of December, a group of sea turtles invited 65 people from overseas to spend two days at a Marriott hotel in the Pudong district, China’s financial hub and home to Shanghai’s stock exchanges. The event was supported by the Pudong government and gave bank executives and agency officials a chance to mingle with people like Will Lu, who works for a merchant banking company out of Los Angeles.
The 34-year-old native of Shanghai, who graduated from USC’s Marshall School of Business, says he was there to network with key people in government and business. ‘As in Wall Street, you have to know someone to get into the industry,’ he said. The Pudong event was Mr. Lu’s third such recruiting session in China in a month. The others were in Beijing and Guangzhou.
When Mr. Lu left China in 2001, he remembers, he and his friends were drawn to the US and its opportunities. That attraction is still there, he says, but the financial crisis has accelerated a shift to the East.
‘The focusing point of the world,’ he said, ‘will be changing to China.’
Staff writers David Pierson reported from Los Angeles and Don Lee from Shanghai. -- LAT-WP
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