Many who entered university during Trump's first trade war with China are ready to become key cogs in China's hi-tech engine. — SCMP
When Jack Wang enrolled as an undergraduate in microelectronics at a prestigious Chinese university, the year was 2019, and China was in the early days of its trade war with the United States.
Looking back, his decision to focus on the field revolving around the design and manufacture of hi-tech microchips has proved prescient. Today, it complements Beijing’s aspirations to make world-leading semiconductors amid Washington’s amped-up efforts to curtail China’s technological progress.
Indeed, the sector has grown by leaps and bounds in the six years since Wang laid out his focus of study, and it now serves as the backbone for artificial intelligence (AI) advancements.
“I realised that this industry was booming, and AI had been kind of popular back then – it just wasn’t as capable as it is today,” he said.
2019 was also the year that China’s Ministry of Education approved the first batch of AI majors at 35 universities, following an action plan in 2018 that sought to turn Chinese universities into global talent hubs leading the development of next-generation AI by 2030.
Today, more than 535 universities in China offer AI-related majors, and nearly half of the world’s top AI researchers are from the country, according to recent findings by Morgan Stanley.
That massive pool of AI talent, in a nation of 1.4 billion people, is giving China a competitive edge in the field that has become a defining battleground in global technological and geopolitical competition, researchers and industry professionals say.
But in many respects, they note, China is still seen as lagging behind the US. They point to less industry-academic collaboration, weaker conversion of research into impactful technologies, and a lower risk tolerance among investors.
Having been pursuing postgraduate studies in the same field at the same university, Wang is expected to graduate and join China’s growing army of AI workers next year.
“Since I entered university, many universities have started their own microelectronics and integrated circuit programmes and expanded their admissions,” he said, noting how this translates into more graduates each year.
According to annual reports by the Chinese Ministry of Education, AI undergraduate programmes in Chinese universities have been on a developmental “fast track” in recent years. In 2020, AI was the most added undergraduate major. Though growth has since slowed, it still ranks among the top newly approved majors.
The biggest AI innovations have occurred in the past five years and likely will continue in the next five, when China’s abundance of talent will give it exceptional strength, said Zhang Yaqin, head of the Institute of AI Industry Research under Tsinghua University, a world-leading research and education institution in this field.
“China’s greatest advantage [in AI] is its talent pool. Young people majoring in AI are emerging at a rate of about five times that of the US, including those from Tsinghua University,” he said during a sci-tech conference in Beijing last month.
Ren Zhengfei, founder of Chinese tech giant Huawei Technologies, also sees the large number of young people as China’s top advantage in AI development.
“China has hundreds of millions of adolescents, who are the future of our nation,” he was quoted as saying by the People’s Daily on Tuesday when asked about the industry’s prospects.
The number of AI talent reserves in China exceeded 700,000 as of 2024, a year-on-year increase of 25%, according to a report by AI education service provider Beijing Uniwise Technology last year.
In 2022, 28% of top AI researchers were working in China, up from only 11% in 2019, according to data from MacroPolo, a think tank of the Chicago-based Paulson Institute.
This has mainly been driven by China’s vast application scenarios, particularly those close to practical use, said Gu Ning, deputy president of Beijing-based AI start-up Doodod.
“AI is just part of China’s tech rise, where it is already exporting technologies and business models, which we can see in the cases of TikTok and Temu,” he said, adding that it “is creating a favourable environment for professionals”.
Job postings for algorithm engineers and machine-learning roles in China were respectively up by 44% and 18%, year on year, during the first quarter of 2025, according to data from Zhaopin, a major Chinese jobs platform.
Tech giant Xiaomi is expanding its 20,000-person research and development team to somewhere between 50,000 and 100,000 in the future, founder and CEO Lei Jun said earlier.
China’s efforts to cultivate AI talent date back to 2018, when the education ministry rolled out an ambitious action plan to guide higher-education institutions to target the global forefront of science and technology and provide strategic support for the development of China’s new generation of AI.
The large number of graduates from China in related areas produced over the years has been helping to form AI workforces across the Pacific.
In 2022, 38% of top-tier AI researchers working in US institutions were of Chinese origin, based on their undergraduate degrees, surpassing the 37% of American origin, according to MacroPolo.
“It now seems that the competition in the entire AI industry is between Chinese people in China and Chinese people in the US,” said Cao Changdan, co-founder of another AI start-up in Beijing.
Many Chinese trained or employed in the US have chosen to return home as China represents more opportunity for career advancement, while there is an “invisible ceiling” for Chinese working in American companies, she said, referring to a prevailing salary cap for them.
President Donald Trump is making the environment more difficult as he tightened visa controls on Chinese students and restricted top universities’ ability to admit international students in recent weeks.
The US-China trade war and unfriendly policies beyond trade have made more entrepreneurs focus on the domestic market, Cao said.
In 2023, her company launched a companion robot that was mainly sold overseas, but has now shifted to products targeting domestic users, such as a new AI tool that gives advice to China’s university entrance exam takers in their school applications.
Despite China’s quick catch-up in cultivating and absorbing AI specialists, the US remains attractive partly thanks to its substantial investment in AI research, which tends to be longer-term and has a greater tolerance for mistakes than things are in China, she said.
“Many investments in China come from state-owned capital, which carries the risk of state asset loss, leading to greater caution. As a result, Chinese companies face greater difficulty in securing funding for technological innovation,” she said.
Though China now ranks No 1 globally in AI patents and technology clusters, according to the Morgan Stanley report published last month, a robust ecosystem of leading tech companies in the US is also adding to its attractiveness.
“Despite the similar number of research publications in 2023, one of the major factors maintaining the US’ leadership in AI industry-driven research is the active involvement of private-sector firms in AI research, which allows for rapid conversion of high-quality research into impactive technologies and applications,” the report said.
In contrast, in China, all of the top 10 institutions in AI research are academic institutions, it said.
Gu from Doodod believed that developing a mix of academic organisations and private-sector firms is the long-term path to success for China.
“Only content that is genuinely forged through market competition represents the true direction of innovation,” he said. “AI applications must be profitable to create a virtuous cycle in the industry.”
China also needs to reform the evaluation and management of scientific research if it wants to retain more tech talent, urged Chu Zhaohui, a senior researcher at the state-backed China National Academy of Educational Sciences think tank in Beijing.
“The current evaluation system does not encourage creativity but is bureaucratic and seniority-based, with the most prominent issues being its focus on papers and projects, whereas other countries may prioritise outcomes,” he noted.
Wang, the microelectronics students, however, is determined to stay in his motherland after graduation.
And while many young job-hunters face a bleak labour market due to China’s economic slowdown and surplus of graduates, Wang said he believed it would not be hard for him to secure a job, thanks to his speciality.
“My education was all in China, and other countries except the US do not hire many graduates of the microelectronics major,” he said. “Also, because of Trump’s unfriendly policies on foreign students and immigrants, working overseas is not an option for me.” – South China Morning Post
