[IP] China Tries to Woo Its Tech Talent Back Home

[Dave Farber <dave@farber.net>]

------ Forwarded Message
From: Lillie Coney <lillie.coney@acm.org>
Date: Mon, 25 Nov 2002 11:33:50 -0500
To: Gene Spafford <spaf@cerias.purdue.edu>, Barbara Simons <simons@acm.org>,
Neumann@csl.sri.com, Dave Farber <dave@farber.net>, Susan Landau
<susan.landau@sun.com>
Subject: China Tries to Woo Its Tech Talent Back Home

China Tries to Woo Its Tech Talent Back Home
Silicon Valley dot-com casualties can return to a booming economy in their
native land.
By Rone Tempest
Times Staff Writer

November 25 2002

SAN JOSE -- After two decades of watching thousands of top computer
engineering and science students immigrate to the United States, the
Chinese government has launched an aggressive push to win back some of the
country's brainpower from the economically stressed Silicon Valley.

"We think some Chinese engineers will go back to China because they have
been laid off here and have no jobs," said Wang Yunxiang, China's consul
general in San Francisco. "In comparison, the overall situation in China is
very good."

Since 1979, when the late leader Deng Xiaoping broke with China's
isolationist policy, more than 400,000 mainland Chinese students have
traveled abroad for graduate study. Only a relatively small number,
estimated at 10% to 25%, have returned home.

Many ended up settling in the Silicon Valley, where they own start-up tech
businesses or work as integrated circuit design engineers in many of the
region's most successful companies.

But the downturn in the U.S. high-tech industry, along with a booming
market in China, has renewed hopes that the people whom former Premier Zhao
Ziyang once called China's "stored brainpower overseas" may be ready to
return.

Many cities have shiny skyscrapers labeled hopefully in Chinese: "Returning
Student Entrepreneurial Building." Chinese companies and development parks
now offer salary and benefits for recruits roughly equivalent in purchasing
power to those here in one of America's most expensive communities.

The Chinese government also sponsors all-expenses-paid trips to China,
where top officials fawn over visiting engineers, who are sumptuously
entertained.

A returning engineer with several years' experience in America can expect
free housing, a car and driver, and other perks not available in the United
States. Foreign science and technology degrees convey high social status on
returning engineers.

Different Job Markets

"We are kind of in the doldrums in the job market over here, but over there
people are welcomed with open arms," said Robert P. Lee, chief executive of
two Silicon Valley software companies and president of the Asia America
MultiTechnology Assn., one of several business associations composed
primarily of mainland and Hong Kong Chinese engineers.

"The benefit packages are smaller but, in the local economy, still quite
good," he said.

Many expect the recruiting push to accelerate now that 59-year-old Hu
Jintao, a graduate of the prestigious Qinghua University engineering
school, has been chosen as the country's new leader. In a rare overseas
visit laden with political symbolism, Hu toured the Silicon Valley even
before being named general secretary of the ruling Communist Party last
week.

The China push was on display most recently at a San Jose job fair -- paid
for by Chinese state sponsors -- that drew more than 4,000 China-born
engineers to the Santa Clara County Convention Center.

"It was much bigger than the typical recruiting session that traditional
Chinese provincial governments have been doing over the past two years,"
said AnnaLee Saxenian, a UC Berkeley professor who has done extensive
studies of the Silicon Valley's immigrant communities. "There is a sense
now that they can draw on this overseas Chinese community who are now
willing to go back and start companies."

"Platinum" sponsors, which included the Shenyang and Shanghai technology
parks, paid $10,000 to take part in the fair. China's Ministry of Science
and Technology was listed as a "supporting organization." The only U.S.
participant was Pittsburg, Calif., a struggling blue-collar city on the
Sacramento River that came seeking new businesses. At many of the booths,
engineers were lined up several deep.

"Ten years ago," said Stephen W.Y. Lai, who was manning a booth at the job
fair for the Hong Kong Science and Technology Parks, "no one would have
been interested because there were too many opportunities in the U.S."

Some of those attending the Nov. 8-10 "China Meets Silicon Valley" event
said they were attracted by the opportunities they see in China.

Chu Jiajin, 69, a retired electrical engineering professor from China, said
he is tempted to return to his native land after being laid off from his
$100,000-a-year job at Quicksilver Technology, a start-up integrated
circuit company in San Jose.

But his son, Jeff Chu, 37, is hesitant. The younger Chu and his wife, both
engineers and naturalized American citizens, live comfortably in a $900,000
home in Cupertino and are reluctant to give up their combined $250,000
salaries to take a risk on making it in China.

"There are some good opportunities that I would consider in China if we
were not doing so well here," said the younger Chu, a chip designer with a
graduate degree in electrical engineering from San Jose State University.

Though the weekend job fair represented the biggest single event of its
type, the Silicon Valley has been the destination for smaller recruiting
delegations in recent months. Shanghai alone sent several dozen recruiters
into the valley recently.

Chinese engineers and their start-up companies play an extremely important
role in the technology economy here, accounting for an estimated $10
billion in annual sales.

But if the patterns established by an earlier "reverse brain drain" to
Taiwan in the late 1980s and early '90s hold true, both places can
experience some benefits. The engineers will maintain their academic and
business links with the U.S. and the American industry will benefit from
the cheaper labor costs and manufacturing in China.

One factor helping the Chinese government effort is that, in the era of
globalization and China's acceptance into the WTO, the flow of brainpower
is no longer a one-way street.

In fact, top executives travel back and forth between China and the Silicon
Valley so frequently now that in Chinese they are jokingly called
astronauts.

Maintaining Ties

Even if they do choose to return to China to establish businesses, many
engineers will probably maintain their U.S. citizenship or academic
connections in North America.

"It used to be that if you went to the U.S., it was, 'Bye-bye, see you when
you're 65,' " said Ping K. Ko, a former professor of microelectronics at UC
Berkeley who now runs a high-tech venture capital company in China. "But
opportunity now is worldwide. It's no different than working in California
and looking for job opportunities in Texas."

For that reason, Saxenian said, she prefers the term "brain circulation" to
the classic "brain drain" to describe the immigration shifts affecting the
Silicon Valley.

"If they started to go back in very large numbers ... it could affect the
Silicon Valley," Saxenian said. "But I don't see that happening in the
short run. Most people understand that this is still the center of tech and
the biggest market."

For its part, the Chinese government still encourages its top students to
seek graduate education in the United States. "There will be no reverse in
students coming here," Wang said.

But through its recruiting drive and other inducements, the government is
hoping more will come back, ending the historic outflow of top graduates.
They include green card holders, those who possess H1B visas for skilled
high-tech workers and naturalized American citizens -- including many who
benefited from the blanket asylum granted to students after the 1989
Tiananmen Square democracy movement.

About 30% of the Silicon Valley's technology businesses, which account for
a total of $19.5 billion in sales and 72,800 jobs, are run by Chinese and
South Asian entrepreneurs, Saxenian said.

A popular joke in the valley in recent years is that the corporate acronym
IC stands not for "integrated circuits" but for the Indians and Chinese who
run them. Companies founded by entrepreneurs from China make up the largest
group.

Forty-year-old Li Ping, one of those entrepreneurs, is torn by the lure of
China.

"We are running out of opportunity here," said Li, who owns a high-tech
machine shop in San Jose. "China is like the American West at the turn of
the century."

But having gained American citizenship and with children in American
schools, Li, like many other Chinese engineers here, fears he may be too
entrenched in his new country to make the break for the old.

"It makes me think of an old Chinese expression," he said, sipping a glass
of California red wine at the job fair's ornate banquet, "San si nian he
dong san si nian he xi."

Literally translated, it means, "Someone who has lived 30 years on the east
bank of the river should then live 30 years on the west bank to provide
balance."

Lillie Coney
Public Policy Coordinator
U.S. Association for Computing Machinery
Suite 510
2120 L Street, NW
Washington, D.C. 20037
202-478-6124
lillie.coney@acm.org


------ End of Forwarded Message

-------------------------------------
To unsubscribe or update your address, click
  http://v2.listbox.com/member/?listname=ip

Archives at: http://www.interesting-people.org/archives/interesting-people/