China Faces Another Round of Brain Drain

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Last updated at: (Beijing Time) Friday, July 26, 2002

China Faces Another Round of Brain Drain

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China must take effective measures to check the third wave of brain drain.

China's closer integration with the international market and the escalating trans-boundary wrestle for talented professionals are helping transporting more and more well-educated Chinese technicians and executives to alien lands, according to the Market Daily, a subsidiary of the Beijing-based People's Daily.

Without countering measures, this round of brain drain will greatly affected development of China's hi-tech industry, finally making it impossible for China to rise as a leading power in the hi-tech sector in the world, the newspaper said.

In 2000, the number of overseas-employed Chinese white-collars surged by 160 percent to 39,000, according to the statistics by the Ministry of Public Security. Over the same period, the export of Chinese blue-collar labor rose merely 23.5 percent, with its absolute total below the white-collar exporting number.

This means that the well-educated-&-trained professionals are taking place of the farming and workshop hands as the main forces of Chinese labor outflow.

After forerunners' footprints

With China's entry of the World Trade Organization and against a backdrop of the economic globalization, the current wave of brain drain starts with different reasons and will flow to distinctive destinations, if compared with the former two rushes of going abroad in the early 1980s and throughout the whole 1990s.

The first batch of alien-land-seekers left China usually in a mood of melancholy and disappointment: The ten-year-long "Proletarian Cultural Revolution" had ironed on their hearts a deep and painful scar of the insane class struggle; the then just-started reforming effort by the central government seemed too unpredictable to let them pin their remaining lifetime upon it.

So, they packed away, despite their ages of around 30's or older.

The second exodus was much more happier: Full of rosy expectation of China's future, young university graduates hoped to make themselves academically stronger.

In their mind, China should learn nearly every thing from the Western: from science and technology to human values. They believe one day they can refurnish the aged oriental country with their learning.

The third round of abroad-goers are by far more confident and pragmatic: They want an affluent living. What they have learned and experienced within China is already sufficient for them to earn a decent life.

The promising prospect

The internationally connected talents market has made the prospect of the third wave international career-pursuers seemingly quite bright.

This year, there are in the United States about 1.6 million technical posts, half being vacant; and Germany also needs to hire from the international market 20,000 IT professionals, according to the newspaper.

For the whole European Union, their demand of Internet-related staff still falls short of 600,000 in 2002. During the upcoming 10 years, Japan will have to employ from outside 1.6 million to 4.45 million hi-tech staff, said the newspaper.

As for foreign businesses established in China, local technical professionals are the pillars for their success.

To date, the number of Chinese working in foreign-funded enterprises stands at 15 million, of which 2 million serve as managerial and technological staff, said the newspaper.

China's accession into the WTO will further quicken the outflow rate of Chinese professionals, because now they will be able to calculate their prices in a worldwide market.

Some firms from Hong Kong Special Administration Region have posted, for the talents they want, a price tag of 500,000 HK dollars per year, a covetous number when most mainland professionals are working for one fifth of the figure.

Moreover, foreign headhunters have been allowed to do their business, through launching joint ventures and cooperatives with local employment intermediaries, in capital Beijing and the east business metropolitan Shanghai.

Experts believe that foreign headhunters' entry into China's employment market will surely smooth the pipes for sending more Chinese professionals to foreign lands or foreign companies in China.

By PD Online staff Forest Lee

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