Are overseas Chinese brains and talent returning home to roost?

China Focus: Rising China, a magnet for overseas Chinese talent
Source: Xinhua| 2017-11-06 21:54:45|Editor: Yang Yi
BEIJING, Nov. 6 (Xinhua) -- Deng Weiwei felt a sense of loss when he found out his former schoolmates were working on the launch of China's Tiangong-2 space lab, while he could only follow it on social media. It was on April 27, 2017 that Deng abandoned his tenured position as associate professor at Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University. After giving his last lecture, he finally returned to China after living in the United Sates for 15 years. Deng is among thousands of overseas Chinese talent flooding back to China. In 2016, a total of 432,500 overseas Chinese students and researchers returned. The number first exceeded 100,000 in 2009 when China started its overseas talent introduction plan. The Chinese government at central and local levels has helped top overseas talent to return and settle with a scientific fund to facilitate their research. China invested 1.57 trillion yuan (235.6 billion U.S. dollars) in research and development (R&D) in 2016, with an annual growth of 11.1 percent. Now, China has become the world's second largest investor in R&D. Such bold investment guarantees favorable research conditions for returnees … for more, go to http://news.xinhuanet.com/english/2017-11/06/c_136732417.htm 

Are overseas Chinese brains and talent returning home to roost?

KUALA LUMPUR (January 2018): Is the US still the land of opportunities and choice country for the talented to settle down?

What has happened or developing is that there are already talented individuals who have left the US to return to their homeland.

If life and freedom in China is as bad as painted by the pro-US media, why then are Chinese brains in the US returning home to roost?

Or is the situation just an isolated case or isolated cases?

I Love Malaysia-China Silk Road reproduced below a The Star Online report on at least one such case of a Chinese talen who returned to China from the US and made some US$100 million!:

"Chinese workers abandon Silicon Valley for riches back home

TECH NEWS
Friday, 12 Jan 2018
9:00 AM MYT

Wang at the Liulishuo headquarters in Shanghai, China. Wang's popular English teaching app raised US$100mil in July, putting him in the growing ranks of successful Silicon Valley alumni lured back to China by the promise of a brighter future. — Bloomberg

A few years ago, Wang Yi was living the American dream. He had graduated from Princeton, landed a job at Google and bought a spacious condo in Silicon Valley.

But one day in 2011, he sat his wife down at the kitchen table and told her he wanted to move back to China. He was bored working as a product manager for the search giant and felt the pull of starting his own company in their homeland. Still, it wasn’t easy persuading her to abandon balmy California for smog-choked Shanghai.

“We’d just discovered she was pregnant,” said Yi, now 37, recalling hours spent pacing their apartment. “It was a very uneasy few weeks before we made our decision, but in the end she came around.”

His bet paid off: his popular English teaching app Liulishuo or LingoChamp raised US$100 million in July, putting him in the growing ranks of successful Silicon Valley alumni lured back to China by the promise of a brighter future. His decision is emblematic of an unprecedented trend with disquieting implications for Valley stalwarts from Facebook Inc to Alphabet Inc’s Google.

“More and more talent is moving over because China is really getting momentum in the innovation area,” said Ken Qi, a headhunter for Spencer Stuart and leader of its technology practice. “This is only the beginning.”

Chinese have worked or studied abroad and then returned home long enough that there’s a term for them – “sea turtles.” But while a job at a US tech giant once conferred near-unparalleled status, homegrown companies – from giants like Tencent Holdings Ltd to up-and-comers like news giant Toutiao – are now often just as prestigious. Baidu Inc – a search giant little-known outside of China – convinced ex-Microsoft standout Qi Lu to helm its efforts in AI, making him one of the highest-profile returnees of recent years.

Alibaba Group Holding Ltd’s coming-out party was a catalyst. The e-commerce giant pulled off the world’s largest initial public offering in 2014 – a record that stands – to drive home the scale and inventiveness of the country’s corporations. Alibaba and Tencent now count among the 10 most valuable companies in the world, in the ranks of Amazon.com Inc and Facebook. Chinese venture capital rivals the US: three of the world’s five most valuable startups are based in Beijing, not California.

Tech has supplanted finance as the biggest draw for overseas Chinese returnees, accounting for 15.5% of all who go home, according to a 2017 survey of 1,821 people conducted by think-tank Centre for China & Globalisation and jobs site Zhaopin.com. That’s up 10% from their last poll, in 2015.

Not all choose to abandon the Valley. Of the more than 850,000 AI engineers across America, 7.9% are Chinese, according to a 2017 report from LinkedIn. That naturally includes plenty of ethnic Chinese without strong ties to the mainland or any interest in working there. However, there’re more AI engineers of Chinese descent in the US than there are in China, even though they make up less than 1.6% of the American population.

Yet the search for returnees has spurred a thriving cottage industry. In WeChat and Facebook cliques, headhunters and engineers from the diaspora exchange banter and animated gifs. Qi watches for certain markers: if you’ve scored permanent residency, are childless or the kids are prepping for college, expect a knock on your digital door.

Jay Wu has poached over 100 engineers for Chinese companies over the past three years. The co-founder of Global Career Path ran online communities for students before turning it into a career. The San Francisco resident now trawls more than a dozen WeChat groups for leads.

“WeChat is a good channel to keep tabs on what’s going on in the circle and also broadcast our offline events,” said the UC Berkeley grad who’s hosted sessions for Alibaba and JD.com Inc as well as online travel service Ctrip.

Ditching Cupertino or Mountain View for Beijing can be a tough sell when China’s undergoing its harshest Internet crackdown in history. But its tech giants hold three drawcards: faster growth in salaries, opportunity and a sense of home.

China’s Internet space is enjoying bubbly times, with compensation sometimes exceeding American peers’. One startup was said to have hired an AI engineer for cash and shares worth as much as US$30mil (RM119.79mil) over four years.

For engineers reluctant to relinquish American comforts, Chinese companies are going to them. Alibaba, Tencent, Uber-slayer Didi Chuxing and Baidu are among those who have built or are expanding labs in Silicon Valley.

Career opportunities however are regarded as more abundant back home. While Chinese engineers are well represented in the Valley, the perception is that comparatively fewer advance to the top rungs, a phenomenon labelled the “Bamboo Ceiling.”

“More and more Chinese engineers who have worked in Silicon Valley for an extended period of time end up finding it’s much more lucrative for them career-wise to join a fast-rising Chinese company,” says Hans Tung, a managing partner at venture firm GGV who’s organised events to poach talent. “At Google, at LinkedIn, at Uber, at AirBnB, they all have Chinese engineers who are trying to figure out 'should I stay, or should I go back.’ ”

More interesting than prospects for some may be the sheer volume of intimate data available and leeway to experiment in China. Tencent’s now-ubiquitous WeChat, built by a small team in months, has become a poster-child for in-house creative license. Modern computing is driven by crunching enormous amounts of data, and generations of state surveillance has conditioned the public to be less concerned about sharing information than Westerners.

Local startup SenseTime for instance has teamed with dozens of police departments to track everything from visages to races, helping the country develop one of the world’s most sophisticated and extensive surveillance machines.

China’s 751 million Internet users have thus become a massive petri dish. Big money and bigger data can be irresistible to those itching to turn theory into reality.

Xu Wanhong left Carnegie Mellon University’s computer science Ph.D. programme in 2010 to work on Facebook’s news feed. A chance meeting with a visiting team from Chinese startup UCAR Technology led to online friendships and in 2015, an offer to jump ship. Today he works at Kuaishou, a video service said to be valued at more than US$3bil (RM11.97bil), and commutes from 20 kilometres (12 miles) outside Beijing. It’s a far cry from the breakfast bar and lush spaces of Facebook’s Menlo Park headquarters.

“I didn’t go to the US for a big house. I went for the interesting problems,” he said.

Then there are those for whom it’s about human connection: no amount of tech can erase the fact that Shanghai and San Francisco are separated by an 11-hour flight and an even wider cultural chasm.

Chongqing native Yang Shuishi grew up deifying the West, adopting the name Seth and landing a dream job as a software engineer on Microsoft’s Redmond campus. But suburban America didn’t suit a single man whose hometown has about 40 times Seattle’s population. While he climbed the ranks during subsequent stints at Google and Facebook, life in America remained a lonely experience and he landed back in China having soured on Western life.

“You’re just working as a cog in the huge machine and you never get to see the big picture. My friends back in China were thinking about the economy and vast social trends,” he said. “Even if I get killed by the air and live shorter for ten years, it’ll still be better.” — Bloomberg"

The number of Chinese students who opt to return to the homeland after studying abroad has been steadily increasing in recent years. V.T. Polywoda Flickr
Why Chinese overseas students are now returning home in record numbers
by Zhanna Koiviola Apr 28, 2017 06:48 EDUCATION
China is the world's largest source of students pursuing education overseas, but the number of Chinese students who opt to return to the homeland to launch their career and contribute to the development of the country has been steadily increasing in recent years. According to statistics from the Ministry of Human Resources and Social Security of China, 2016 saw a record high of 432,500 ‘returnees’. The outbound-to-return ratio has increased by about 10 percent in the past four years: from 72.38 percent in 2012 to 82.23 percent in 2016. The soaring trend becomes even more striking when put in a more extended timeframe: in 2006, only about a third of all Chinese students returned homeafter finishing their education abroad. “I feel like China with its rapid economic development has better job opportunities for me,” says Wang Yufei, a 33-year-old from Beijing who studied Electrical Engineering at Cornell University in Ithaca, USA … for more, go to https://gbtimes.com/why-chinese-overseas-students-are-now-returning-home-record-numbers