Li Yuan reports in the Wall Street Journal, photo by Patrick Fallon in Bloomberg:
China’s government and businesses are trying to attract top-caliber engineers, scientists and other skilled technical workers, particularly U.S.-based Chinese professionals. Recruitment is a priority in national strategies that map out plans for mastering a dozen cutting-edge fields, including aviation, information networks and new energy vehicles as well as robotics. “Engineers are about the only thing that can be transferred seamlessly between the U.S. and China.”
The Trump administration, alarmed that a brain drain to China may erode the U.S.’s technological edge and weaken national security, is trying to restrict Chinese ownership of some U.S. tech companies.
Meanwhile, China is tapping into American know-how another way: poaching talent.
China’s government and businesses are trying to attract top-caliber engineers, scientists and other skilled technical workers, particularly U.S.-based Chinese professionals, according to officials, recruiting agents and those being approached. Silicon Valley, with its nexus of big tech firms, research labs and venture investors, is a prime target.
Early this year, a leading Chinese government adviser on technology policy addressed a packed convention center hall here to promote the prospects created by China’s demand for cutting-edge technologies and its deep pockets. “We’ve gathered you all here to explore new opportunities for cooperation,” said Ye Tianchun, speaking in Mandarin.
Over 300 people, the majority of them Chinese and Chinese Americans, showed up to hear Mr. Ye, who guides China’s research into semiconductors. So many came that the opening banquet didn’t have enough food and seats, leading Mr. Ye to ask the attendees to share.
China is laying ambitious plans to be a technology powerhouse, aiming at dominating the industries of the future, from artificial intelligence to biotechnology and robotics, to make the nation, in the words of President Xi Jinping, “a global leader in innovation.”
That effort has the U.S. worried. The Trump administration has prepared new restrictions to block firms with at least 25% Chinese ownership from buying companies involved in what the White House calls “industrially significant technology,” according to people familiar with the plans. President Donald Trump suggested Tuesday those restrictions may be scrapped, and instead existing
tools will be used to limit access to U.S. technology by Chinese firms.
Recent reports from the Trump administration have pointed to conferences like the one Mr. Ye spoke at and the presence of Chinese tech companies in Silicon Valley as channels for talent-poaching and luring startups to China. A visa clampdown is also being considered to limit access to American trade secrets posed by Chinese scientists, students and companies in the U.S.
For now, companies are well positioned to keep recruiting.
Big Chinese tech companies like e-commerce giant Alibaba Group Holding Ltd. and search engine Baidu Inc., have research-and-development outfits in Silicon Valley. A three-story building called Z Park, set up by a Beijing government company, was set up to serve as a hub for Chinese tech companies and venture-capital firms.
In an era in which computers run everything, computer scientists and engineers are in high demand and tend to job-hop frequently. Employees at some of the biggest U.S. tech firms on average switch jobs after two years or less, according to a survey last year by Paysa Inc., which tracks compensation in the tech world.
After completing her computer engineering doctorate at a prestigious university in China, Gu Junli headed to Silicon Valley. She interned at Google’s headquarters, then joined chip maker Advanced Micro Devices Inc., where she worked on big data and artificial intelligence applications before going to Tesla Inc. as lead expert for the electric-vehicle maker’s autopilot unit.
Twenty months later, in October last year, Ms. Gu jumped again, to Xiaopeng Motors, a Chinese electric vehicles startup backed by Alibaba where she is vice president for autonomous driving, based in Palo Alto. Her experience, she says, makes her a catch for Chinese companies. “If you’ve participated in creating a product, you’ll know where the pain points and the complexity lie,” says Ms. Gu. “If you haven’t done anything about it, you won’t know where to start.”
Such career moves tend to be personally opportunistic. They also fit with the Chinese government’s organized effort to close the gap in leading technologies. Recruitment is a priority in a handful of recent national strategies that map out plans for mastering a dozen cutting-edge fields, including aviation, information networks and new energy vehicles as well as robotics.
“Engineers are about the only thing that can be transferred seamlessly between the U.S. and China,” says Zhou Yunkai, a China native, Google veteran and a co-founder of Silicon Valley-based headhunting startup Leap.ai, which uses artificial intelligence to match users with potential jobs.
Chinese, many of them graduates of top U.S. and Chinese universities, are a huge presence in the area, providing engineering manpower for Facebook , Google and other marquee American tech firms. During the Lunar New Year, alumnae chapters from China’s top engineering schools hold banquets for their members across the Bay Area.
When Leap.ai was founded two years ago, it initially intended to serve the wider tech community. Unexpectedly its users are predominantly Chinese, says co-founder Richard Liu, also a Google veteran.
Among Leap.ai’s total, but undisclosed, number of users, about 70% are engineers and 50%-55% are Chinese. Chinese businesses tend overwhelmingly to hire Chinese: According to human resource specialists, at Chinese tech companies in the U.S., more than 80% of the engineers are Chinese speakers.
Recruiting key personnel is an effective way to try to close a gap between competitors, according to engineers and human-resources managers. American companies have come to legal blows over talented engineers who jump ship to competitors, as Uber Technologies Inc. and Google offshoot Waymo LLC did over autonomous driving.
Ms. Gu, the former Tesla engineer, says her new employer Xiaopeng based the autonomous driving unit in Silicon Valley, because the area leads the world in critical technologies like microprocessors and is rich in “core talent.” At the top of her profile page on the professional networking site LinkedIn, she has posted “(We are hiring)” next to her name.
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