Chinese capital dangles carrots to lure foreign talent to its Silicon Valley | Hacker News Reader

Chinese capital dangles carrots to lure foreign talent to its Silicon Valley

reuters.com

50 pointsSirLJ103 comments

Unless they make exceptions for the Great Firewall, this carrot won't be so enticing.

The Beijing municipality has said it will even consider allowing foreign professionals to bring in their own foreign maids, currently illegal in Beijing.

Well shit, sign me up.

This was actually a big issue for one of my friends. They wanted a Filipino maid for communication reasons and were even able to manage it for a few years (before 2010 or so). But then China cracked down on the practice and they had to go with a chinese one eventually.

You get a foreign maid, and you get a foreign maid. Everyone gets a foreign maid!

Yes I cant see that being a thing for 99% of the potential western candidates unless they are targeting the ME and India

No.1 SMOG SMOG SMOG

No.2 No google available

Bring ten foreign maids won't fix that. I'll just pass.

About the smog, i'm in shanghai right now, and i can tell you that the air is far less polluted than Paris, France. It's actually quite weird, because i thought the exact same thing as you regarding smog, i thought i would have to wear a mask for the duration of my trip. I was amazed at the number of electrical vehicle here (not a single motorcycle running on gas).

Note that it may be due to the chinese new year holidays (although it's been over for two weeks now), or to the price of real estate that rose to such a level that nobody can live downtown anymore... I'm not sure the reason, but i was really really surprised.

The city should be almost deserted during CNY. But right now at the moment of this post, Shanghai is worse than Paris:

https://aqicn.org/city/shanghai/ (95)

http://aqicn.org/city/paris/ (66)

It also depends on where in Shanghai and where in Paris. Also Shanghai and Beijing is a bit different.

The AQICN pages with readings have maps so it’s easy to explore different areas if you want. The outskirts of Paris are mostly in the green(better air), the outskirts of Shanghai are yellow or orange (worse air).

Thanks for the link, i was wondering if maybe shanghai had a different kind of pollution that i wouldn't notice (i can't really tell from the graph, but i think maybe pm10 is something that you'd feel more). Although they're both globally in the "yellow" range..

CNY is really over now. Some shops were closed last week, but everything's been back to normal for the last three days.. Also, Paris is experiencing a unusual freezing temperature, so maybe there's less activity.

Do you know if there are some historical data on the site ? i'd be really interested to compare the days i left Paris with the day i arrived in Shanghai, because the difference was really amazing.

EDIT : looking more closely at the shanghai map.. If the location is really precise, then it seems that the indicators are all set close to the huge circle roads surrounding the central city. If you want to compare that with the paris equivalent (and not the indicators next to the river), you'll find the same kind of values.

CNY isn’t really over for another week or even two. The lull in traffic usually lasts for around three weeks. Even if the shops are open, many haven’t returned from vacation yet.

Pm2.5 is the big killer that everyone is worried about these days. PM10 is larger particles like dust which should be less of a problem in SH. Historical data is included on site, but no easy way to compare them.

There isn’t a place in shanghai that isn’t next to a major road, it’s a city of 10 million. They used to try and game the system by putting AQI stations out in the suburbs but these days those places actually have worse pollution.

The big circles around shanghai are a completely different beast than just "major road". Just like Paris "périphérique" is in a league of its own.

I've had a 6h foot walk just 2 days ago in shanghai (inside the first circle, travelling all around the city), and i can tell you the amount of dust i inhaled was nothing compare to what i'm feeling when i walk inside Paris. Now maybe CNY is a huge factor indeed, unfortunately i won't be there anymore to see for myself... All i can say then is that it's a great time to visit the city ! :)

I've been to SH plenty of time and I know about the ring road topology (same as Beijing actually). But if you look at the map, it just gets worse, not better, as you get farther from the center.

CNY is a great time to visit Shanghai, Beijing, Shenzhen, and Guangzhou, since people there either (a) go home (they aren't locals) or (b) go on vacation somewhere else far away. CNY practically lasts longer than the official golden week, so traffic is light as well.

Chinese New Year holiday week does indeed bring down traffics on the road just like what Thanksgiving night does on America's road. However, China's transportation electrification has been going on for at least half a decade, as this Deutsch Bank white paper indicated in 2012[1]. Anecdotally, I think the electrification transition started as far back as a decade ago (disclaimer: I visit China annually since 2007).

[1]: https://www.db.com/cr/en/docs/China_GreenCars_080712.pdf

Ha! - In the article that smoggy image was worth a 1000 clear breaths on this side of the pond.

I guess you've never been to LA on a hot, windless summer day.

Moved to LA from Beijing, no comparison unless there was a forest fire going on.

You can't even fairly compare LA in the 80s (where I lived) to Beijing (or Hebei) today, much less the "smogless" wonderland that is the valley of today. The winter smog (ignoring outliers like CNY or political events) is worse than you can imagine. Typical PM2.5 is in the hundreds... a bad day in the week might be 500, and once a year they break the instruments with 900+ measurements.

I can't infer whether 80s LA was worse or better than Beijing today from your comment.

Sorry for the confusion, on the worst single day of smog I observed in Pasadena during the early 80s, the visibility was about as bad some 5-10 days I have observed in Beijing and multiple other cities in the last 2-3 years. It's not getting better, and it is so much worse than it was 15 years ago!

I thought it was getting better in China this year... I really did, but then winter came and you could barely see across the street at midday. Southern California meanwhile went from months of missing mountains to a day or two here and there during the summer over the course of 10 years as catalytic converters became standard.

I think it’ll work if the carrots are big enough. People from the west have no issue working in Dubai if the check is big enough.

There are 37M college students in China and around the world. Why do they need foreigners to come over?

http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/china/2016-04/08/content_243650...

Likely because they are still in college, and China would rather want the leaders in their fields to work for them instead, and also teach the newly graduated to take it from there?

Also, literally every student I've met in China wants to go to the US. Undergraduates want to do their Master's there, Master's students want to do their PhD, I guess PhD students want to become professors at a US university.

Yea that's also true, in Asia, the western education is perceived as far superior to theirs.

IMHO they need to offer an officially sanctioned legal VPN for those with such Visas. It is too annoying as a technical worker doing research to reside in an environment where access to information is unpredictable.

Anybody want a mini-AMA? Worked with Chinese for bigger part of my career and did two long term on-site consulting contracts. I lived in both Shanghai and Shenzhen.

Would you do it again? I hear mostly good things about living in China once you get past the culture shock.

If there will be a good offer? Yes, without any doubt.

Getting a good offer is what makes the biggest difference.

There are good jobs on the table, and they are ok for your first take on Chinese job market. $3k to $4k net income is what you can get as a developer in an in demand niche with 4~5 years experience.

For me, after 6 years, just "simply good jobs" are not enough. They have to be really great. Something like with a clear road to above $4k $5k net income salaries, or $40 per hour or more short term contracts.

Getting such offers is totally possible after few years there making connections and proving yourself.

About quality of life and livability. I had zero complaints for last few years. Best districts of major cities in China score more on livability for me than most of Europe and America. See, the difference there is you can have great life with just mid-to-high ordinary job there. An equal lifestyle option in fancy parts of SoCal and London is virtually impossible without above 2nd percentile salary and good perks.

How hard would it be to find a position in China if I don't speak Chinese? Are there certain places I should look for information on this? Job websites?

This will limit you to 1 in 3 jobs open to foreigners. Which is still very good. See, the main value of a foreign specialist is that he is foreign and supposedly have rare expertise. Second to that, you will most likely to be hired with an idea in mind that you can liaise with overseas customers/specialists/authorities and etc even if your job does not implicitly require that.

Best option is to actively solicit contacts and network a lot. Foreign professionals are a closely knit club here. Industry events are the best if you know nobody here.

Look for job offers in English, job boards of companies with a record hiring foreigners, foreign companies that are new in China, super senior level positions, jobs with PhD. level expertise level, jobs requiring people skills in English "product managers/ field application engineers/ sales or solution engineers"

Websites: 51job, zhaopin, ChinaHR. Look for English language keywords. A post in English almost certainly assumes the company keeps hiring a foreigner an option.

Thank you for the helpful reply!

Maybe, once Wikipedia and Gmail are available full scale.

Wikipedia isn’t blocked in china yet as far as I know. Internet censorship is a big deal for foreigners working in China, especially since playing the cat and mouse VPN game is so tiring.

wikipedia + https isn't blocked? so there's literally nothing preventing people from visiting https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tiananmen_Square_protests_of_1... ?

In English not a problem, however Wikipedia chinese is blocked from time to time. Note that they did block certain pages (like that one and the DL’s page) before Wikipedia moved to https for everything, then wiki was blocked for a while but they eventually unblocked it.

I'm in shanghai right now on a local ISP. I can view the page.

Wikipedia started being blocked when I lived in Beijing in 2005. I'd be surprised if it isn't still blocked.

It wasn’t blocked in 2007 when I moved to Beijing nor in 2016 when I left. There were times when it was blocked, but not for very long. Wikimedia was blocked a bit more, it still sporadic.

Interesting. I assume you were viewing Wikipedia on something other than a laowai corporate network. I'm pretty sure I've had wikipedia blocked the other times I've been back to China, but I don't remember any more. I suppose the conventional wisdom is that the government doesn't want to spend as much effort to suppress information for the cosmopolitan, educated class.

Wikipedia (Chinese) is blocked, but you could circumvent by adding a few lines of DNS records for zh.wikipedia.org into your /etc/hosts. Sites for other languages are fine for a few years.

I wonder if one takes away someone's internet is he/she to consider themselves "poor"? I would certainly think so of myself.

Honestly, the blocking doesn't make any kind of sense. You can literally create a vpn from within china itself on any cloud provider and surf on anything you want, in less than 10 minutes using softwares like algovpn.

It's now a moment of truth for internet in china : either they start blocking vpns for real (although good luck doing that without collateral damage to the economy, because that would mean shutting down a ton of services), or they just open it.

My bet is that they'll open it. They have services on the same quality as US ones, some even more advanced like wechat , they're already 1 billion user strong, i'm pretty sure they'll benefit tremendously from opening the gates.

It's a matter of principle. Also, unacceptable if you can be prosecuted for posting stuff.

The overwhelming number 1 priority of the Chinese Communist party is to remain in power and remain in control. Everything comes second place to that. Economically it would make sense to do what you say, but to do so would be an unacceptable loss of control over the ability to monitor and curtail communication in China, so they won't do it.

Additionally, they do certainly have the ability to detect and shutdown VPN's based on traffic analysis, for the most part they don't do this most of the time but during specific sensitive political events they can and will.

"remain in control" is also what i thought, but then i changed my mind and now think the reason is now (almost) purely economical. The reason is that :

- google maps is blocked, but apple maps isn't

- google is blocked, but yahoo and bing aren't

- youtube is blocked, but other video sites such as rutube.ru are accessible, and just searching sensitive keywords led me to things like that https://rutube.ru/video/49d364dd24dc25c5855aa9113c107567/?re...

and the list goes on and on. Once again, it doesn't make any sense.

Google very publically and explicitly said they would not abide by China's rules regarding their services about a decade ago. I wouldn't be surprised if those other services have local chinese servers which are serving the requests from China and are effectively subject to chinese laws.

VPNs are now unreliable, they're using ML to detect traffic patterns that look like VPNs.

That you can (or have in the past) used a VPN does not mean that it is legal (or feasible now even with ExpressVPN). See this link for travelers below. Other than commercial "private" company VPNs which are themselves regulated in China using a VPN can lead to various forms of punishment and may not work as well as you would hope. It really depends on how you connect (e.g. mobile or wired), where you connect from (Beijing or Urumqi), and what you are viewing (english email or chinese video).

https://www.travelchinacheaper.com/is-it-legal-to-use-a-vpn-...

The goal isn't to block things 100%, it's to make it enough of a hassle to use them that the Chinese population turns to domestic alternatives.

Oh yes, carrots, with a side of dictatorship. Sounds quite tempting.

US-biased headline. This is what US-tech firms have been doing for years, dangling carrots on foreign talent. The same reason why the US VC-lobby has been up in arms on anything and everything work visas related. China is the new USA.

Why is it a US biased article? China has been doing this for years also, just not very well. I still think they aren’t doing very well in this area, especially since they make immigration or at least permanent residence so impossible, but other issues related to child education costs and environment make it difficult to live and work in china long term.

The language is pretty poor - "bait" "lure" etc. They might as well have written ITS A TRAP.

As I read it, I felt enough spin to not fully trust the point about maids at the end. Was it cherry picked item from a whole slew of legal relaxations for its shame value or is it really an isolated, important and notable act presented dispassionately? I can't tell.

Those aren’t very strong words, I don’t get the same word sentiment as you do, I’m also a native English speaker.

Bait specifically, is a pejorative form of incentive. It has many negative meanings including deception, trapping, tormenting, teasing, bait-and-switch etc. There is a range of less emotive language to choose from and I can't read such a thing without assuming intentionality.

For example, have you ever heard of Google "baiting employees with free food"? I haven't. To do so is to describe setting up a trap. Instead its positive language: perks, incentives, benefits etc.

It really depends on the context. For example "baiting employees with free food" seems completely innocuous to me. Everyone knows what is up, nothing nefarious is going on.

Journalism involves using colorful words to make the article colorful enough to read. Even the Chinese media does this, it isn't just an American thing. Articles that aren't read are worthless.

Hmm. Its interesting to hear a different view but I can't agree. Language has tremendous power and using it to signal to the reader whether they should approve of something in what might claim to be objective factual reporting is quite insidious to me.

I strongly dislike the "journalism using colorful words" and China comparison as a defence of deception and manipulation. Our standards should be higher. Plenty of room for colour with good quality writing.

(edit: just to clarify the article is question raised my spin flags but only to a level that is within the lazy-writing/unconscious-bias zone too)

The original post said this was an example "western media bias", my comparison to Chinese media was to diffuse that point.

Journalists who write in the manner you prescribe don't last long if they exist at all. No one wants to read such sanitized drivel.

Huh? In what way is it biased? I'm sure that if China wants talent to come, then they should be happy about this free publicity.

The difference is that US lures people to move and eventually become citizens. China want's people to work there, transfer the technology and go away.

It's basically impossible to naturalize as Chinese citizen even if you marry a local and live there for decades. Japanese are strict in immigration but they take ten times more immigrants than China. Only about 1000 people get Chinese passport per year.

If a 10 year wait time for greencards and restricting the H4 spouses of those skilled visa workers to work legally is not a carrot, then yes US is doing a great job attracting and retaining talents.

I went behind the carrot for 3 years and then immigrated to Canada. My spouse has dignity now and she is a full time employee just like me earning a very good salary. In US, she lost all her confidence,dignity and was depressed because she was "not allowed" to work though she was a post graduate degree holder.

Any skilled workers who care about their H4 spouses should do the same.

https://travel.state.gov/content/travel/en/legal/visa-law0/v...

https://www.forbes.com/sites/stuartanderson/2017/01/28/green...

http://h4-visa-a-curse.blogspot.ca/p/home.html

https://qz.com/797831/the-h4-visa-and-the-desperation-of-ind...

One million people get green cards each year in the US.

Immigrants and their children are now 27% of the US population.

Show me the numbers on China.

And if you want to talk about Canada and dignity. Why is Canada only 1% hispanic? Because they restrict immigration overwhelmingly by skill. If you can't meet their skill-based requirements, you're very unlikely to get in. How's that for treating people with dignity? The US has ~46 million immigrants currently, ten million more people than the entire population of Canada.

> One million people get green cards each year in the US.

Is a blanket statement. The topic is about skilled immigration. Majority of US green cards are family based.

Source here: https://www.us-immigration.com/how-many-immigration-applicat...

> Immigrants and their children are now 27% of the US population.

Immigrants from 1800s maybe ?

> Show me the numbers on China.

China has just started. I dont think there is any data yet. Even if there is, wont be easy to find.

> Why is Canada only 1% hispanic? Because they restrict immigration overwhelmingly by skill.

No they don't. They encourage both. Express Entry is for the skilled ones, family based quotas parents and siblings in addition to asylum and refugees. Isn't that how immigration is supposed to work ?

> How's that for treating people with dignity?

Canada have temporary worker visas similar to H1B. They issue the spouses of those temporary skilled workers with open work permit. Dignity & freedom from the day one they land in Canada. There are no carrots in Canada for temporary skilled workers. If you satisfy Express Entry points which you almost will, you can apply for permanent residence. Your permanent residence is not under the control of your employer master. Canadian employers cant threaten your Express Entry application. You wont have to wait 10 years or get kicked out of the queue if you change jobs or gets fired while being on H1B.

Those who come to Canada as students get a post graduate work permit. No lotteries, no quotas and can apply to express entry and become residents unlike those unfortunate master degree holders who are at the mercy of their employer masters and waiting 10 years for their GreenCards.

The fact that open work permits are issued for spouses of temporary skilled workers in Canada proves that temporary workers are treated with dignity in Canada than H1B workers in the US.

Are the points above dignifying enough ?

> Only about 1000 people get Chinese passport per year.

How did those people earn it? Or is it just lottery based?

They were probably former Chinese citizens or Chinese descendants. China is open to immigration for Han people; e.g. during the HK handover all Han living there were granted Chinese citizenship while all non-Han were not, leading to some HK residents without citizenship in any country.

How do you establish Han-ness today, an ever shifting concept?

It’s usually on your ID card and assigned at birth.

which is illegal according to the UN

They still have HK passports. It really depends if you think HK is its own country or not. The Chinese just have different answers depending on convenience.

>Only about 1000 people get Chinese passport per year.

i suspect that's a combination of han biased policy (as mentioned in a sibling comment), and the fact that nobody wants a chinese passport. china doesn't allow dual citizenships[1], so for a chinese with "western" citzenship, getting a chinese passport is a downgrade, unless you really sure that you want to stay in china.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nationality_law_of_the_People%...

I only heard of 1500 people to ever get Chinese passport through means other than marriage since 1998

I agree with your comment, but it still is dangling carrots. Some soft, some hard.

Would you rather China, now on its way to being led by a dictator no different than a Mugabe-like figure in Africa, gain this talent to be used to bolster state run entitities — you know they’ll use any foreign tech developed on Chinese soil for government purposes — or let a relatively less corrupt, much freer government like the USA bring this talent over to build industry in the states where people are much more free, and you’re not indirectly helping the next chairman Mao?

And to say something so bold as “China is the new USA” is to link the US to things like unending autocratic control, corruption, etc., the list could go on. So no. I disagree. If China wanted to be the new US it would start where the US started and being in the poor, tired, cold etc.,

While I agree with your overall point... this:

> If China wanted to be the new US it would start where the US started and being [bring?] in the poor, tired, cold etc.,

China just had a billion of those people, 15-20 years ago. They still have a quarter of a billion people living on less than $3 per day. Maybe they'll get to what you're referring to eventually, assuming their economic expansion survives the shift back to a strong-man dictatorship.

that comment you quoted was more a blanket attack at the cold way in which immigration is done. Send us your doctors, your lawyers, your engineers, but keep your poor and the like. That's the motto currently used but it's not what is on the statue of liberty. All should be welcome, and we can educate them, and we'll have those that have an entrepreneurial spirit create industry here in the US vs. elsewhere.

I'm not exactly a fan of Xi, but theres some serious racial overtones in that little screed my friend. China has been an autocratic state for decades, Xi didn't reinvent the wheel here, and, also, while Mugabe sucked, his perception in the west was more than a little colored by racism. This is an excellent discussion, by a renowned South Asian intellectual who was driven out of Africa by no less than Idi Amin.

https://www.lrb.co.uk/v30/n23/mahmood-mamdani/lessons-of-zim...

There is in fact absolutely no racial overtones in that screed. It sounds like you simply didn't like it. The parent was very plainly targeting authoritarianism. Dictatorship isn't a race.

I'm curious, in what possible way is Xi "mugabe-like", what does that even mean? I'm also bowing out of this thread because I don't see anything positive coming out of your reading of me or of my reading of the parent. You might take some time, admittedly a bit, to read the article I linked

Mugabe was a dictator for decades. Xi is perhaps about to become a dictator.

Where's the confusion? There are maybe a dozen particularly infamous dictatorships of the last 20-30 years. Mugabe is one of those. Having ruled Zimbabwe for 37 years, he was also one of the longest tenured political figures of the last century. Who would make for a better example? One could certainly use Franco, Chavez, Hussein, or Pinochet. Mugabe is just as legitimate to use as an example.

I'm guessing you didn't read the linked article, at all, given that its been ten whole minutes since I commented. For real, bowing out of an unproductive conversation now.

Except in the US you can actually integrate into society and be treated as an American[0], that's not true of China.

[0]: I know there's still racism and discrimination, but if we're comparing to China let's at least compare the two countries on the same scale.

Consider for example what Asian Americans have accomplished in a relatively short amount of time in the US (most Asian immigration has occured in the last 40-50 years). Highest education levels, lowest unemployment rate, lowest crime & murder rates, highest incomes, highest household wealth levels, longest life expectancies (of any demographic in the US).

In how many large countries has something like that ever taken place (quite peacefully at that)? It's an exceptional testament to the ability of immigrants to contribute to the US, become integral to its success and be accepted.

Not really its brining in cheap complaint entry level employees who are desperate for a job.

This is an interesting one. Is this related in any way to the "token white guy" types of jobs which are apparently available in China?

No. White monkey jobs are mostly over. Maybe you can find one in some remote tier 88 city, but not in Shenzhen.

this is crazy, I had no idea these even were a thing. It sounds like a Coen Brothers plot.

Not for me, I like being able to say "I disagree" on social media.

Other than the visa-related benefits, what type of monetary benefits do foreigners get for moving to China?

Pay is pretty good (about 70% of Seattle) while living costs are low. I was able to save about 30-40% of my take home over almost 10 years.

So China pays much better than Western Europe? Is this actually true?

If you're in HongKong probably.

Hong Kong doesn’t pay programmers as well as Shenzhen outside of a few banking related jobs. Not a good comparison. HK is more of a business/banking center, so programmers don’t have as much status as they do across the border in Shenzhen.

Western Europe sans Switzerland doesn’t pay very high, so ya. You’ll see more Europeans working tech in china than Americans. Likewise, Japan, Taiwan, and Korea also generally don’t pay programmers as much as China does, so you’ll see foreigners from those countries working in China (and the fact that they are next door).

Yes. HK, Shenzhen, Beijing, Shanghai pay on par or better, especially if you are in finance / fintech / AI.

I've spoken to tech workers from Beijing and my impression from them is the cost to purchase homes was on par (if not higher) than SV (and Seattle).

Is rent that much cheaper?

Yes! You can rent an apartment that retails for a million dollars for $1500/month or less. It is just a huge property bubble, actual residential demand isn’t that strong.

Yes, but.... there is a lot of but there:

Technically speaking (literally), a shack in Gangxia, Shenzhen can have market value from $1m to $2m, but nobody will ever sell it. They have no value other than of land under them.

Rents for a room there were around CNY400 per month 5 years ago.

80ies era apartments - also cheap, but quite a lot of them are in even worse shape than property in villages.

post 2000 housing - gets better, actually livable somewhat. Look for 4k CNY in good locations.

Western like proper highrise apartments - no less than 9k, availability is smallish. Everybody is looking for then. I was looking for one in Huafu area, but they just go too fast to even get sense of a price

> while living costs are low.

Are you sure? From what I've seen, Shanghai real estate is comparably expensive to SF.

Only if you buy. Rents definitely aren’t. Shanghai and Shenzhen are worse than Beijing on rents, but not incredibly so, you won’t find $4000/month one bedroom apartments unless it’s some kind of luxury skyscraper. $2000/month for a nice two bedroom is easy, you could probably go lower than that and still be in a decent location.

I had a place in 老西门 that was about $3000, not a luxury skyscraper, but owned by a French landlord, I think the closer you are to large ex-pat populations, the more expensive.

Ya, if you are in the French Concession in Shanghai, it can get a bit pricey I guess. Beijing really has nothing like that, well I guess you could try living in Sanlitun or something.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com