Despite a pledge from President Xi Jinping late last year that China would “exhaust all means” to recruit innovative professionals from around the world, implementing the edict has hit a few roadblocks.
China’s fraught relationship with the United States, its strict immigration policy and stringent coronavirus-control measures have blocked foreign talent’s path to the world’s second-largest economy.
At the same time, fellow Asian economies such as Taiwan and Singapore have stepped up efforts to attract workers from around the world.
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This is especially true for the technology industry, through offshore-hiring programmes, offering incentives to international students at local universities, and making it easier to apply for visas and residency.
They, too, like mainland China, are dealing with a shrinking talent pool due to a low birth rate and ageing populations.
Frank Bickenbach and Liu Wan-hsin from the International Trade and Investment Research Centre at the Kiel Institute for the World Economy predicted in a paper published in the Intereconomics journal late last month that the number of foreigners living in China will continue to decline.
The continuation of strict Covid-19 restrictions, China’s relatively restrictive migration policies and increasing public resentment towards expatriates were cited as reasons for the drop.
“The people-to-people decoupling spurred by travel restrictions and the declining number of foreigners in China more generally could become another amplifier of the more general economic and technological decoupling tendencies between China and the West,” Bickenbach said.
“And it will further reduce mutual understanding between China and the West, not only in business, but also in politics and society at large.”
The seventh national population census revealed the number of foreigners living in China for more than three months rose to 845,697 in 2020, from 593,832 a decade earlier, though an official update has not been released in the last two years.
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Various chambers of commerce in China have said international companies have responded to the human resources challenge by increasing localisation efforts, while hoping that Beijing will make economic development a priority once again after the 20th party congress.
A South African native, who conducts research on regional issues in Africa at a university in Beijing, said he was planning to leave China after four years because the country’s tight travel restrictions – imposed to control the spread of Covid-19 – had prevented visits to his homeland.
“I miss home. I couldn’t go back because of the pandemic,” said the academic, who did not want to be named due to the sensitivity of the issue. “If I could travel home intermittently, maybe I would stay.”
A Chinese public health professor, who also wished to remain anonymous due to the sensitivity of the issue, said he had also seen many non-Chinese scholars leave the country.
“People were very mobile before Covid-19, but now it’s a hassle to travel even once or twice a year,” he said. “So the impact of the pandemic on attracting talent is quite significant.”
While China ranked 37th in INSEAD’s Global Talent Competitiveness Index last year, it was just 78th out of 134 countries in terms of “attractiveness”. For “external openness”, China slipped more than 10 places from the previous year to 87th.
Shirley Ze Yu, a non-resident senior practitioner fellow at Harvard Kennedy School, said talent will not go to China unless it offered the best global opportunities, making continued opening up to the world “essential”.
China’s 14th five-year-plan for 2021-25 said the long-term goal was to promote high-quality development driven by innovation, predominantly fuelled by the domestic market.
“According to the five-year plan, China plans to increase its efforts to attract technology-leading foreign companies and their research activities, as well as foreign scientific and technological talent,” Bickenbach said.
“Similarly, China’s aim of strengthening the domestic market and promoting self-contained domestic supply chains should not be interpreted as a general retreat from promoting foreign trade and investment.”
Gerard Postiglione, a professor at the University of Hong Kong’s Faculty of Education, said China was already a global leader in science and technology because it had been able to attract top talent, and that would continue if its recruitment drive was “reset” once the pandemic was no longer an issue.
In the past, China was seen as a welcoming destination for overseas scientists due to its generous funding and top-level jobs.
Examples include two Japanese researchers, chemist Akira Fujishima, known as the so-called father of photocatalysis, who joined the University of Shanghai for Science and Technology in September last year, and Mikoshiba Katsuhiko, who joined ShanghaiTech University in 2019 to continue his molecular neurobiology research.
However, a survey of almost 2,000 US-based scientists last year by the Committee of 100 – an organisation of prominent Chinese-Americans in business, government and academia – found that 23 per cent of scientists of Chinese descent and 10 per cent of non-Chinese scientists had decided to stop collaborations with researchers in China.
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They cited the China Initiative, which was launched by the Trump administration in 2018 to combat alleged economic espionage before it was discontinued by the Biden administration earlier this year.
The MIT Technology Review – a bimonthly magazine wholly owned by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) – reported in December that only 40 of the 148 individuals charged under the initiative had pleaded or been found guilty.
The report found that guilty pleas often involved downgraded charges – and many cases had “little or no obvious connection to national security or the theft of trade secrets”.
“The technological cooperation between the US and China many years ago was very smooth,” said Li Qing, director of the talent research group at the Centre for China and Globalisation, a think tank based in Beijing.
He said the two sides had reached a tacit understanding that the US would focus on top-level technological innovation and China on its industrialisation.
“But the US may consider that China’s technological innovation is developing faster and faster and has concerns that China will take over its position in the future,” he added.
Postiglione said, however, that it was largely impossible to decouple China’s economic and scientific systems from those of other leading countries despite geopolitical tensions.
“Dedicated scientists and scholars try to find ways around tensions to build international collaboration for the sake of the global common good and the advancement of science,” he said.
Chinese scholars’ hesitancy about returning is also seen as another factor holding back talent recruitment efforts, with the 2020 “Survey of Earned Doctorates” showing 81 per cent of over 6,000 mainland China and Hong Kong passport holders who received a doctoral degree in the US planned to remain for further research or to pursue a career.
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Alaric Lin, a research scientist at a university in Zhejiang, said that unlike the situation in overseas research environments, institutes in China forced researchers to send papers for publication – “even some very meaningless ones”.
“The harder the subject is, the more it needs to be honed, yet researchers are discouraged from doing so in this country,” said Lin, who asked not to be fully identified due to the sensitivity of the issue.
Wang Sini, a PhD student at Jilin University, said in a report published in March on the cultivation of young scientific and technological talent that the Chinese assessment system was mainly based on short-term quantitative results.
She added that it had also discouraged researchers from exploring new fields of knowledge and made it difficult to achieve innovative breakthroughs.
According to a 2020 report by the US-based MacroPolo think tank at the Paulson Institute in Chicago, China was the world’s largest source of top-tier researchers, with 29 per cent having received undergraduate degrees from Chinese universities. However, 56 per cent went on to study, work and live in the US.
The US had a large lead over all other countries in top-tier artificial intelligence research, the report added, with nearly 60 per cent of researchers working for American universities and companies.
“The fundamental problem is still related to the mechanism, academic ecology ... I hope we can be more lenient and humane in the management of original scientific research,” Guo Chuanjie, a fellow at the International Eurasian Academy of Sciences, told Chinese news aggregator NetEase News in March.
Lin, who has had six papers published, said he was considering whether to stay in China, or return to New Zealand – where he earned his second doctorate – after failing to secure research funding in August under a national scheme to nurture young Chinese scholars.
He said it should have been “very easy” to get the funding,” but applications were particularly dependent on the academic status and network of the applicant’s professor, including whether they had received any awards.
China’s strict immigration policies are also seen as another bottleneck when it comes to attracting global talent.
“Developed countries rely heavily on skilled immigration systems to attract talent that serves the overall development needs of the country,” said Gao Yi, a deputy researcher at the Chinese Academy of Science and Technology for Development.
“The proportion of international migrants in China is far below the world average, and there is still a long way to go on building a mature system of skilled migration.”
According to a report by Georgetown University in Washington, around 42 per cent of people who earned science, technology, engineering and mathematics doctorates in the US between 2010 and 2019 were international students, compared with just 7 per cent of total PhD graduates in China.
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“I think China is currently making the same mistake as Japan by enforcing a very rigid immigration policy,” added Yu from the Harvard Kennedy School.
“Singapore is doing much better and is poised to be Asia’s most prominent cosmopolitan country.
“China also needs to launch global-based industrial policies, not only for the domestic companies to gain a competitive edge over international competitors, but for the best of the world’s companies to truly gain a stronger market share in China, a policy very similar to the Chips and Science Act in the US.”
Last month, National Development Council head Kung Ming-hsin said Taiwan needed to attract 400,000 mostly white-collar foreign workers over the next decade to support the island’s pillar industries, including hi-tech, as the domestic population gets smaller.
Just under 800,000 foreigners held Taiwan residency permits as of late 2020, as many expats were lured by the island’s lack of a Covid-19 outbreak – an outlier in the world at that time. But as cases crept up, that total dropped by 5 per cent in 2021, to 752,900 foreigners, according to official figures.
Europe and America can easily compete with China to attract foreign talent because they have comprehensive policies in place, added Li at the Centre for China and Globalisation.
“They first let people study, then talent will go for internships and work, slowly they will integrate with the society and develop the innovation together,” he said.
“We still need a lot of policy modification to convert international students to human resources and keep outstanding international students [in China] to develop our country.”
More from South China Morning Post:
- As young Chinese with ‘no desire to fight’ take pandemic path to adulthood, the impact will be felt for years
- China’s vocational college graduates find low pay, fierce competition the norm in tough job market
- China’s youth say no thanks to work as ‘soulless robots’, even amid bleak job prospects
- China looks to plug job market damage from tech crackdown with more support for internet economy
- China’s youth jobless rate remains stubbornly high, despite slight improvement in August
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