Luring back talent is top priority to fuel innovation

Attracting Chinese students back from abroad has become policy at the highest level of the Chinese government in a bid for world-class talent to fuel an innovation boom in the country as it moves away from reliance on manufacturing as its main engine of economic growth.

“To spur innovation, China will make more effort in encouraging overseas Chinese students to return after completing their studies, while creating a fast track programme to attract more foreign talent to China,” Premier Li Keqiang said at China’s National People’s Congress (NPC) session which opened in Beijing on 5 March.

This is the second year in a row the leadership has highlighted the need to lure back Chinese who leave for a foreign education, in major speeches to the NPC, roughly equivalent to a parliament, making it clear the policy is driven from the top, according to experts.

In this year’s annual government Work Report to the NPC, talent return was even more closely coupled with China’s aim of becoming a global technology power. “In the global race of scientific and technological innovation, China has shifted place, from following others to keeping pace and even leading the pack in more areas,” said Li.

“The latest global revolution in science and technology and industrial transformation are trends we must be on board with,” he said. Li’s speech used the term “Internet Plus” – using the internet to upgrade the country’s economy, such as through e-commerce – and “innovation” a number of times while saying technology and artificial intelligence could upgrade traditional manufacturing industries.

The Work Report showed that the contribution of technological advances to the country’s economic growth has risen from 52.2% to 57.5% in the past five years.

“It is the first time that kind of language was used in a Work Report to the party Congress,” says Paul Triolo, an expert on China innovation at Eurasia Group, a political risk consultancy.

“The party has clearly grasped onto things like AI [artificial intelligence] and the digital economy as the economic drivers going forward,” he told University World News.

The combination of rapid growth in the high-tech sector and the time it takes to bridge the skills gap by training high-end talent and expanding the number of university courses that can do so, leading to a severe shortage of specialised faculty, has led to the call for graduates to return to prevent the government’s massive innovation drive from stalling.

The ultimate goal, though acknowledged as still a long way off, is to reverse the brain drain of Chinese students flocking to study in the West. If that can be achieved, it will be a clear indication that China has ‘arrived’ on the global stage as a technology nation, experts noted.

Despite China’s decade-old Thousand Talents programme, which has lured back some 6,000 high-end academics, the country still has some difficulty attracting back talent in the most in-demand sectors, particularly those with PhDs and experience in cutting-edge science and engineering.

The recently published Global AI Talent Report states that there are roughly only 22,000 “PhD-educated researchers in the entire world who are capable of working in AI research and applications”.

“While AI education in China has been growing rapidly, serious AI faculty are still hard to find. Many AI practitioners in China have transitioned from a field like electrical engineering or another branch of computer science,” it says.

“As a whole China is at a distinct disadvantage on basic research, having had a late start, and having less than a dozen universities with advanced AI programmes compared to many dozens in the United States. Finding sufficient numbers of qualified AI faculty remains a huge challenge,” said a paper published late last month on China’s AI global leadership challenges, co-authored by Triolo.

Skills gap

Tencent, China’s internet giant based in Shenzhen, noted in its Global AI Talent White Paper published in Chinese last year that the large-scale cyber-security crisis in 2017 highlighted a serious global shortage of skilled IT personnel, which was even more severe in the Chinese market.

“In the past three years, there were only 30,000 graduates each year in relevant higher education institutions in the country, and the demand of the industry has reached 700,000,” Tencent estimated.

Tencent and Guangzhou University in China’s southern Guangdong province have now set up a joint laboratory “to accelerate network security personnel training and technological innovation”.

Such collaborations are vulnerable, however, as universities struggle to keep faculty members from jumping ship to industry, lured by high salaries, particularly in fields such as AI.

Since the government published its July 2017 Next Generation Artificial Intelligence Development Plan, to turn China into the “world’s primary AI innovation centre” by 2030, AI has become a major focus in China, with government agencies responsible for coordinating university and research institute work, restructuring programmes and creating new AI-related courses and research centres.

Nanjing University was the latest to announce a major new Artificial Intelligence College on its campus this month.

AI drive could stall

Given such strong backing from the government to bring back graduates and professors from abroad, Chinese companies and recruiters have been hosting events on university campuses in the United States, sometimes backed by provincial and municipal governments who are vying against each other to attract the best to newly created ‘innovation hubs’. Many are luring candidates from foreign universities with offers of free housing and office space.

In October a dozen Shanghai-based universities for the first time launched a joint recruitment drive for professors in the United States.

Fudan University, Shanghai Jiao Tong University, Shanghai University and other institutions in the group sent a 12-university delegation to Harvard University, the University of Pennsylvania and Columbia University. "We are not limited to recruiting only Chinese students, but also foreign experts with higher academic levels who fall within our recruitment requirements," said Lu Qi, the deputy director of human resources at Shanghai Jiao Tong University.

Universities are becoming concerned that fierce global competition for talent has led to some university computer science departments hollowing out as companies poach professors.

At a University Leaders’ Forum just before the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) summit in Vietnam in November, university heads and industry leaders discussed joint strategies on disruptive technologies such as digitisation, robotics and artificial intelligence. Tony Chan, outgoing president of Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (HKUST), noted a trend in the region of many professors leaving for AI companies.

“We are worried who will teach future employees,” Chan told the meeting.

Huang Dinglong, CEO and co-founder of Malong Technologies, a large AI company based in Shenzhen, said companies needed to cooperate with universities rather than pull professors away.

“We have the budgets and we have data [essential for AI] – and universities have the energy to back the talent; we can work together for both universities and industry.”

“While industry has the latest knowledge about what society and the market need, universities are the powerhouse for fundamental research and exchange hub for ideas,” Chan told University World News late last year.

HKUST professors and PhD students now work on AI projects with Tencent. Researchers have access to data from WeChat, Tencent’s ubiquitous social network, and are developing “intelligent” chat capabilities for everything from customer service to Buddhist spiritual advice, he said.

Talent return

Aside from top end AI talent, the phenomenal growth of China’s internet giants, Baidu, Tencent and Alibaba, and many internet start-ups is already luring Chinese students back from abroad.

“China is an increasingly attractive place to return to because there are so many opportunities in cutting-edge areas, companies are devoting significant resources to AI R&D, and China is a key part of the global AI nexus,” says Triolo.

The 2017 edition of the annual blue book of global talent Annual Report on the Development of Chinese Students Studying Abroad, published by the Center for China and Globalization (CCG), a Beijing think tank linked to China’s State Council, notes that the number of returning graduates and postgraduates continues to increase in tandem with government policies to promote employment opportunities back home.

According to a separate CCG report published last year jointly with recruitment platform Zhaopin.com, some 432,500 students returned to China after graduating from overseas universities in 2016, up 36.26% from 2012.

“The biggest ever wave of Chinese returnees proves China is becoming a talent magnet for its rapid economic development,” the report said.

According to a survey of some 1,821 returnees, two thirds had obtained masters degrees overseas and about half had majored in business. Only 16.2% had a degree in the applied sciences and just 3.5% had obtained a doctoral degree abroad.

It notes that the number of returnees employed in IT, telecoms, electronics and Internet industries increased 10% last year, surpassing finance to become the sector most attractive to returnees. Around 15.5% of all returnees opted for jobs in that sector last year compared to 14.6% in finance.