China Tries to Woo Its Tech Talent Back Home
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.”
