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China draws skilled Chinese back home

Many who migrated to the U.S. are returning to an economy that offers richer career opportunities.

By David Pierson and Don Lee
February 24, 2009

Reporting from Shanghai and Los Angeles — Xun Jia, a doctoral candidate in theoretical physics at UCLA, expected to find a job on Wall Street crunching complex financial formulas upon his graduation.

But after meeting with 10 recruiters to no avail, the Chinese native is looking for new opportunities — in the country he left behind.

“I’m definitely considering moving back,” said Jia, 27, who always envisioned himself establishing a career in the U.S. first but is now firing off his resume to contacts in China. “They need people to go back.”

The Chinese government is counting on people like Jia — nicknamed “sea turtles” because they journeyed across the ocean and then came back — to help retool its economy and find paths to expansion beyond the cheap exports on which the country has relied for so many years.

Late last year, the government launched an aggressive campaign to lure them back and is spending millions to entice accomplished investors, bankers, researchers and engineers to come home.

During a 10-day series of job fairs in December, Chinese banks, universities and government agencies interviewed more than 4,400 people in London, Chicago and New York.

The southern city of Guangzhou has created a $30-million fund to attract overseas financial professionals and along with the city of Shenzhen is considering a multicity recruitment tour of the U.S. this summer.

The economic boom that lighted up China in the last decade had already served as a beacon to many expatriates, drawing thousands home from the U.S. and other places.

A record 50,000 Chinese students who studied abroad returned to China last year, an increase of 6,000 from the year before and more than double the number in 2004, government statistics show.

Though there are no official data, the presence of returning Chinese expatriates and foreign-born ethnic Chinese in China has grown over the years, experts say.

In Shanghai, about 4,000 businesses are said to have been founded by returned students, amounting to more than $500 million in investment, Chinese state media have reported.

Charles Zhang, the founder of one of China’s largest Internet portals, Sohu.com, was educated at MIT. At the prestigious Chinese Academy of Sciences, 80% of the faculty studied abroad, as did more than half of those at the Chinese Academy of Engineering.

“You can find most things you were used to in the U.S. in Shanghai now,” said Greg Ye, a graduate of Harvard Business School who returned to found NewMargin Venture, a private equity fund. “I feel like there’s lots more opportunity here.”

With the global recession slowing the economy to levels last seen in 2002, the Chinese government wants even more of those living abroad to come home in the next few years.

“They want to send a positive message that the government is forward-thinking” by looking overseas for help, said Clay Dube, associate director of the U.S.-China Institute at USC. “That’s the political and public relations side of it. Then there’s a real recognition that moving forward, you’re going to need these folks.”

Senior executives in Shanghai’s financial industry said the interest was so high that they alone carried 330 pounds of resumes from the job fairs back with them.

Although it’s unclear how successful the recruiting campaign will ultimately be, financial firms in Shanghai did recently offer jobs to 53 candidates as a result of the fairs, according to Caijing, an influential Chinese business magazine.

State media also reported that Chinese automaker Futian is eyeing laid-off workers in Detroit, hoping to hire about 10 specialists in research and development, production and sales.

The confidence with which China is courting its diaspora reflects the vastly changed attitudes about the country’s prospects since the economy started to flourish in the 1990s.

In earlier years, many Chinese students preferred to stay overseas while China was still struggling to transition out of a state-dominated economy. A generation of students in the U.S. were helped along by the asylum granted them after the Tiananmen Square crackdown of 1989.

But with China’s economic boom over the last decade, the idea of moving back became increasingly palatable and, in many cases, attractive to the ambitious.

Multinational corporations opened offices, entrepreneurs broke ground and living standards soared in the metropolitan areas along the coast.

“The younger generation has no hesitation going back,” said Henry Zhang of the Chinese Finance Assn., which helped organize a recent recruitment fair in New York. “I think it’s a permanent shift.”

Zhang, of Mountain View, Calif., is part of the older generation. He left China to study physics at the University of Texas at Austin in 1989 carrying all of $245. He knew that heading to the U.S. and staying there offered him the most opportunity.

“Before, you would go to America and never look back,” said Zhang, 45. “You had no regrets. You just had to march forward.”

Now, Zhang says he has the best of both worlds. He travels to China frequently to teach investing at an international business school.

He has turned down full-time job offers in China because he thought it would be too difficult for his family to leave America.

Shanghai, the primary destination for those returning, is looking to seize opportunities created by the global downturn to build an international financial center rivaling those of Hong Kong and Singapore.

Recruiting events now occur regularly. In a low-key affair at the end of December, a group of sea turtles invited 65 people from overseas to spend two days at a Marriott hotel in the Pudong district, China’s financial hub and home to Shanghai’s stock exchanges.

The event was supported by the Pudong government and gave bank executives and agency officials a chance to mingle with people like Will Lu, a Hacienda Heights resident who works for a merchant banking firm out of Los Angeles.

The 34-year-old native of Shanghai, who graduated from USC’s Marshall School of Business, says he was there to network with key people in government and business.

“As in Wall Street, you have to know someone to get into the industry,” he said.

The Pudong event was Lu’s third such recruiting session in China in a month. The others were in Beijing and Guangzhou.

When Lu left China in 2001, he remembers, he and his friends were drawn to the U.S. and its opportunities. That attraction is still there, he said, but the financial crisis has accelerated a shift to the East.

“The focusing point of the world,” he said, “will be changing to China.”

China Purchasing Manager (mkt277sh)

Job Title: China Purchasing Manager
Job Description:
Company introduction:
Our client is a world leader in AFC systems for public transport. It successfully completed many metro projects for numerous cities around the world. With the fast development of metro industry in China, Asia and many other countries, our client will reinforce their entity in R&D, program management and other operational positions.

Report To: GM China
Location: Shanghai

China Sourcing Manager

Responsibilities:

1. Set strategic goals and direction for the department to meet the company goal of revenue, capacity, cost, and delivery
2. Will be fully accountable to achieve the ambitious performance-, cost- and working capital targets together with highly motivated global team members.
3. Executes business processes, drives accountability, collaboration and respect.
4. Oversees all facets of material management. Oversee purchasing and inventory control. In charge of planning and forecasting of customer orders. Oversee warehouse and shipping.
5. Establish material purchasing procedures and standards. Develop supplier/vendor qualification program.
6. Works with Canadian and French team.
7. Supports and gains consensus for the organization’s mission, vision and values. Liaison with third party service provider on various supports to the department.
8. Contribute electrical Material Sourcing Expertise to the Global Procurement Hub.
9. Develop high level contacts with major manufacturers of electrical Materials and factored products for the company and other OPCOs as requested in order to secure correct product at the most favourable prices and quality.
10. Assist in developing supply chain procedures for the Global Procurement Hub.
11. Establish and maintain a formal manufacturer’s development, assessment and grading system.
12. Engage in a constant negotiation process for better payment terms and prices develop and implement sourcing strategies and management of supplier base.
13. Ensure that all Data on Product / Location / Specification is provided to Logistics sector.
14. Establish procedures to be incorporated into global project.

Requirements:

1. BA or Master degree in electrical, automation, controlling.
2. 5 –10 Years experience in electrical Materials Industry in China.5 –10 years Purchasing Experience.
3. Experience in global purchasing/supply chain. Experience in cost/inventory reduction/management. Negotiation skills of high rate and easy going and open-minded nature;
4. Should have an excellent knowledge about raw material sourcing with a Chinese market focus. A regional exposure, particularly to China, will be an advantage. Familiar with the material outsourcing market
5. Strong communication capability and team work sprite. Effective problem-solver and strong sense of urgency.
6. Mature and stable and with due carefulness and timeliness. Strong learning capability and high flexibility.
7. Good interpersonal skills, self-motivated and independent.
8. English / Local Language(s) speaker.
* Please send us your complete resume (in Chinese and in English) to: ‘topjob_mkt277sh@dacare.com'(Please replace “#” with “@”)
* In the email subject please include the position name and job #

Chinese Car Designers: Lots of Talent, Few Job Prospects

China’s car makers are increasingly ambitious, as illustrated by plans to grow at home and, in some cases, expand abroad. One big impediment they face in taking on their foreign rivals: design.

Big global companies spend years, and millions of dollars, designing new cars. But many home-grown Chinese auto makers actually do very little of that.

A senior executive of one small auto maker in Hebei recently laid it out for us over a cup of tea: the reason his company can sell cars much cheaper than foreign auto makers who also produce cars in China, he said, is that his company does no engineering or design work whatsoever. Instead, they tell an outside engineering consultant which existing model they want to copy, and ask them to come up with a product counterfeited in a way that it won’t attract intellectual property lawsuits. In some cases that means companies combining styling ideas from two separate cars into one.

The problem isn’t a lack of talent — as China Journal found one recent day on a visit to the China Central Academy of Fine Arts in Beijing. There we met Phoenix Wang and Jackie Lin, two students whose edgy car designs have put them near the top of their class. Both Wang, a 22 year old from Sichuan, and Lin, a 23 year old from Guangdong, have long been determined to pursue car design professionally. But they and their peers have dim prospects in a domestic industry that doesn’t value their skills.

Their instructor is trying to change that. Ed Wong is a former General Motors Corp. designer who over the past five years also has worked off and on as an outside design consultant for Beijing Automotive Industry Holding Corp., helping the company come up with uniquely-designed and –styled cars of its own, which it aims to launch over the next few years. Wong — a 1987 graduate of the Art Center College of Design, the Harvard of car design, in Pasadena, Calif. — went to work at GM’s main design studio near Detroit before becoming a car-design instructor in the mid-90s, teaching car design in California and Hong Kong.

Since arriving in Beijing, he has designed, among other cars, the Beijing Warrior, the rugged vehicle China’s army now uses as its main jeep, and the Beijing 800 sedan and several other concept cars Beijing Auto showed at the Beijing auto show in 2008.

Wong joined the Central Academy of Fine Arts last September as director of the school’s transportation design department, and he is helping change the outlook of students like Wang and Lin.

Wang says she was planning to continue her design studies in the U.S., but Wong brought with him a car-styling curriculum similar to that used at Art Center, and now she no longer feels she needs to go abroad to pursue her dream. Initially an industrial design student learning to design cell phones and bicycles, Lin says Wong “changed my life and outlook.”

Wang and Lin have it better than many of their fellow aspiring car designers. They plan, for now, to work with Wong after graduation, consulting for Beijing Auto. But until Chinese auto makers start taking design more seriously, theirs will remain a challenging job market, and a lot of talent will go to waste.

China’s employment situation ‘grave’: minister

BEIJING — Human Resources and Social Security Minister Yin Weimin warned of a “grave” employment situation in China on Tuesday, but said government measures to boost employment have taken “initial effects”.

With the big drop in company posts, a large number of migrant workers who lost their jobs, and the labor-intensive industry falling as major victim amid global financial downturn, “the employment situation in China is very grave,” he said at a press conference on the sidelines of the parliament’s annual full session.

In face of the grave situation, the Chinese government has taken a series of measures, which have shown “initial effect”, he said.

In the first two months of this year, China saw “a reverse on the dropping trend” in new labor posts in cities, he said.

The number of new laborers stood at 690,000 and 930,000 in January and February, compared with 550,000 and 380,000 in November and December last year, according to Yin.

China recorded the first rise in company posts in February after it dropped for four consecutive months from October last year, he said.

“It’s only a moderate increase of 1 percent, but it’s good news,” he said.

“But can we then judge from the two pieces of good news that our employment situation is turning for the good? I think we should keep on observing the overall economic development,” he said.

China’s export continued the downward tendency in February and will face a “grim” situation in the “coming foreseeable months”, said Chen Deming, Minister of Commerce, at the conference .

“Affected by the global economic recession, China has undergone negative growth in both import and export since last November,” said Chen.

HR: Legislation drafted to put ceiling on executive salaries

The salaries of executives in China’s State-owned enterprises (SOEs) could soon be limited.

A drafted regulation reportedly caps the salary of senior executives at no more than 10-12 times the average of regular SOE staff salaries. The plan also limits the growth of executive pay to no faster than the expansion rate of corporate profits.

According to the National Bureau of Statistics, in the first three quarters of 2008, the average income of SOE employees was 20,576 yuan.

“The salaries of executives in SOEs should be controlled because they are appointed by the government, not chosen by their market value and SOEs enjoy more favorable policies and resources than their private counterparts,” said Liu Junsheng, a researcher with the Ministry of Human Resources and Social Security.

The financial sector will be the first regulated, with a reported ceiling of 2.8 million yuan on executives’ annual pretax salary.

Executive pays came under the spotlight after Guotai Jun’an Securities Co, one of China’s leading State-sector brokerages, revealed a package of 3.2 billion yuan for executive “compensation and welfare” in 2008.

If the 3-billion-yuan total compensation was equally shared by the company’s 3,200 employees, each would receive about 1 million yuan, or 88 times an average urban worker’s annual income.

The financial services industry suffered major losses so the financial companies’ hefty payout deals drew widespread public ire.

An online survey conducted by ifeng.com showed that over 96 percent of netizens said the performance of the executives in SOEs did not match their high salaries.

The salaries of many high-level executives in SOEs are also not transparent to the public. Human resources consulting firm Mercer conducted studies on executives compensation for China’s CSI 300 Index companies traded in Shanghai and Shenzhen stock exchanges since 2005, using publicly disclosed information and found the disclosed compensation information for executives is limited compared to those listed in countries such as the US.

“People have a right to know about executive salaries, including the specific amount, their performance evaluation method and performance results. But this kind of information is not available for companies on the Chinese mainland,” said Zheng Wei, managing director for Asia executive remuneration business with Mercer.

According to the Mercer report, in 2007, most bank presidents’ compensation was about 10-20 times that of an average staff salary. The report also said the salaries of senior executives in State banks have little connection to the banks’ performance.

The highest pay package in financial industry in 2007 was as much as 66 million yuan for Ma Mingzhe, chairman of Ping An Insurance (Group) Co, which garnered criticism on Internet forums.

A draft of a general regulation to cap salaries of high-level executives in SOEs will be submitted to the State Council for approval soon, said Liu.

Cramer’s ‘Stop Trading!’: China’s Red Hot

“China is red hot and staying hot,” said Jim Cramer on CNBC’s “Stop Trading!” segment on Tuesday.

Vehicle sales are up in China, led by General Motors(GM Quote – Cramer on GM – Stock Picks). “People have to understand that the Chinese stimulus plan is really rooted in people’s spending,” Cramer said. It’s “enough to be able to change spending habits, buy more, drive more cars.”

He called China “the best market in the world” and predicted that it still has “far to go.”

But there’s a tradeoff, Cramer said, because China’s stimulus plan isn’t regulated by the rules of a democracy. “A democracy has a lot of different considerations to make it more difficult,” he said. “I’ll take the freedom over what they’ve got.”

Cramer said that Verizon(VZ Quote – Cramer on VZ – Stock Picks) is going higher, and he recommended ag stocks such as Terra Nitrogen(TNH Quote – Cramer on TNH – Stock Picks) and Monsanto(MON Quote – Cramer on MON – Stock Picks).

“Monsanto’s back,” he said, adding that it had a “good” quarter, unlike Deere(DE Quote – Cramer on DE – Stock Picks).

He likes Terra Nitrogen for its dividend. “TNH is a great fertilizer play,” he said.

HR: Top brass may get no pay hikes

Senior executives at nearly a quarter of Chinese companies would see no increase in their compensation packages this year, a survey by human resources consulting firm, Mercer, has found.

In all, 59 companies in China were included in the survey, of which 76 percent were listed companies and 39 percent, multinationals.

Around 34 percent of the surveyed companies said executive bonuses for 2008 would decrease. The average bonus level in Asia was 40 percent for 2008.

The global financial crisis has pushed companies to review executive compensation mechanisms. This is being done to tighten the relationship between executive pay and company strategy.

Around 49 percent of companies in China may adjust their performance evaluation standards in the next 12 months. Nearly 33 percent said they would adjust long-term evaluation standards, the survey revealed.

About 71 percent of the companies surveyed said they had a long-term incentive plan designed to retain talent. Due to the sluggish market, around 14 percent of the companies said the value of their long-term incentive plan (that will be met this year) would be lowered.

Mercer conducted similar surveys in other Asian nations, including India, South Korea, Japan and Singapore.

“In Asia, one-third of the companies surveyed said their senior executives’ salaries wouldn’t increase in 2009. The proportion in China is a little smaller than the average, indicating that the country is less impacted by the financial crisis,” said Zheng Wei, managing director for the Asia executive remuneration business at Mercer.

“Considering the deferred impact on China’s market, we expect more companies in China to take similar measures to limit senior executives’ pay this year,” Zheng added.

Ma Mingzhe, the chairman of Ping An Insurance (Group) Co, received the highest pay package for 2007 in the financial industry, at 66 million yuan. This was a nearly four-fold jump from his 2006 salary and was widely criticized.

About two thirds of Ma’s salary in 2007 came from the long-term incentive plan. “Because of the financial crisis, companies should pay much more attention to the validity and rationality of the salary mechanism and make it palatable to staff and public supervisors,” said Zheng.

Wanda to offer 60,000 new jobs in 2009

Wanda Group, one of the country’s largest private property developers, will offer 60,000 new jobs this year, a company executive said on Wednesday.

“Most of the jobs are created by our rapid expansion this year,” Wang Jianlin, Wanda’s chairman, told China Daily on the sidelines of the annual sessions of the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference (CPPCC).

Wanda plans to build eight shopping malls and two five-star hotels this year. The company has spent 11 billion yuan in grabbing five pieces of land in Shijiazhuang, Tangshan, Tianjin, Hefei and Hohhot since the fourth quarter of last year, despite the sluggish property market.

Xinjiang vows job offers to fresh graduates

Unemployed graduates will get a job offer within 12 hours of an application in the capital of the Xinjiang Uygur autonomous region, officials said Monday.

A record 58,000 graduates are expected to enter the job market in the region this year, up 9 percent from last year, prompting Xinjiang to roll out a slew of measures to help them find jobs amid the financial crisis.

“We can ensure that a graduate student can get at least one offer within 12 hours in Urumqi,” said Li Zhi, party head of Urumqi. Li is in Beijing to attend the ongoing session of the National People’s Congress.

Although he didn’t say what kind of positions would be offered to students, he said that priority would be given to ethnic minority students.

“We will encourage employers to hire ethnic minority students and the government at all levels will arrange positions for them,” Li said.

The efforts are part of a package for all Xinjiang graduates as the region aims to maintain an employment rate of over 70 percent among fresh graduates, said Tian Wen, party chief of Xinjiang personnel bureau.

Xinjiang’s relatively small economy, however, means that there will be fewer urban jobs than the number of new graduates. As a result, they will be urged to go to the countryside to teach or practice as medical workers. Five percent college graduates in the region have been working in rural areas since last year.

“We offer tailored positions to students to support medical and educational developments in rural Xinjiang,” Tian said.

She did not specify how many such positions are offered but said that 80 percent positions are reserved for ethnic minority students.

Both officials called for graduates to take frontline jobs, with Tian saying multiple vacancies exist in the public welfare sector.

Besides, the region has also established five job-training bases in Ili Kazak autonomous prefecture, Urumqi and Aksu. Among the other measures to boost employment among new graduates are subsidizing companies that employ graduates, offering small loans to graduates starting their own businesses, employment guidance to students and organizing specialized job fairs.

Customer Manager ?Credit Marketing?(mkt273sh)

Job Title: Customer Manager ?Credit Marketing?
Location: Shanghai
The largest independent local bank in Hong Kong, with total consolidated assets of HK$415.3 billion (US$53.58 billion) as at 31st December, 2008. The Bank is listed on the Stock Exchange of Hong Kong and is one of the constituent stocks of the Hang Seng Index.
They have long been known for the comprehensive range of retail and commercial banking services that it provides to a wide array of customers. Retail and wholesale banking services are delivered through the Bank’s Personal Banking, Corporate Banking, Wealth Management, Investment Banking, China, and International divisions.
Job Description:
Responsibilities:
1. The development of high quality customers, potential customers to promote the bank’s credit products and services
2. Keep good relationship with customers, the local regulatory authorities
3. Actively expanding in Shanghai and surrounding cities, or new business to collect, update customer information, prepare related reports;
4. Able to work under pressure and complete set of business indicators.
5. Make the mid and long strategy development of business development

Requirement:
1. More than five years working experience in marketing credit and commercial banking firm (Shanghai Area)
2. A strong credit business analysis capability and market development capabilities
3. Positive, be patient and careful and have team spirit
4. Have good customer resources
5. Bachelor degree or above
6. Fluent in English.
* Please send us your complete resume (in Chinese and in English) to: ‘topjob_mkt273sh@dacare.com'(Please replace “#” with “@”)
* In the email subject please include the position name and job #