Eideard

Photo by M. Scott Brauer

One constant challenge China faces as its economy continues to explode is finding talent — people with the managerial, technical and creative savvy who can adapt to the country’s distinct culture and working environment.

They find them at home, but they are not sufficient to meet the growing demand. They also find them among Chinese returning from overseas.

China currently sends more students abroad than any country in the world. Between 1972 and 2009, about 1.39 million Chinese went for further studies, according to official data.

In recent years, more than 400,000 of them returned home, lured by prospects of lucrative jobs and a familiar culture, says David Zweig, a professor of political science at Hong Kong University of Science and Technology who is writing a book on this phenomenon. They are known colloquially as “haigui,” or “sea turtles,” because it sounds the same as the phrase “returned from overseas…”

When Deng Xiaoping initiated his reform and open-door strategy three decades ago, he pushed an overseas-study program. The late leader, who studied briefly in France, believed that scholars and students sent abroad would bring back advanced ideas and expertise needed to modernize China…

For years, critics of the program feared it was creating a “brain drain,” but now the trend has reversed…

RTFA. Anecdotal tales to support Jaime FlorCruz’ analysis.

All of it interesting. All of it worth learning from.

Xinhua Photo

It was in December 1978 that former leader Deng Xiaoping declared the country would not just tolerate private enterprise but encourage it.

Since then, of course, much of the country has been transformed. Millions of people have moved from the countryside to the cities in search of a better life. And after three decades of extraordinary economic growth, there are growing numbers of middle class Chinese with good jobs who are well-off relative to the rest of the population.

Now some of those who moved to cities like Shanghai for good wages in white collar jobs are starting to tire of the rat race, and in a reversal of past patterns of movement are abandoning the urban sprawl for a quieter life in the country.

Gao Hong and Yang Xiaoling, two advertising executives in their mid-thirties, decided a year ago to give up their lucrative careers to move to a quiet house in the country, eight hours drive from Shanghai in Jiangsi province.

“We have lived here for more than a year, and never for a moment have we thought, this is too bad, we have got to get back to Shanghai,” Gao Hong laughed. Leaving the front door wide open, the couple go for a stroll around the village. Facilities are very basic. Some of their neighbours are washing their clothes in the stream by hand. It is like going back 50 or 60 years.

But the couple are happy. “The dogs don’t bark at us now,” they said. “They always bark at strangers, so we know we belong.”

Deng Xiaoping’s economic redirection is working better than anyone might have hoped. Expanding middle-class incomes can be counted upon to produce better educations, a return to meditative ways formerly limited to a tiny niche of scholars and wealthy.

RTFA. Interesting read.

Visitors to the former residence of the late Deng Xiaoping in Guang’an
Daylife/Reuters Pictures

Every day a stream of people climb a winding path to the peak of Shenzhen’s Lotus Hill where a huge bronze statue of Deng Xiaoping surveys the frenzied economic boomtown he helped create out of nothing almost 30 years ago.

“China’s strides toward prosperity belong in some part to Deng Xiaoping,” said Guo Xiao, a 24-year-old migrant worker from Henan province who snapped photos of his girlfriend posing beneath the patriarch of China’s economic opening.

“When we look at him, we think of Shenzhen’s development. He is a great Chinese man,” added Guo, as groups of schoolchildren and a delegation from far-flung Tibet milled about and laid wreaths at the feet of the stylized Communist Party memorial.

The Communist Party leadership’s decision to make Shenzhen a “special economic zone” in 1980 to drive forward reforms is seen as one of the catalysts in China’s transformation from a centrally planned to an increasingly market-driven economy.

“Shenzhen led the way and everyone wanted to emulate Shenzhen’s success … It was a flag bearer while at the same time perhaps a guinea pig, and it was able to harness capital and talent across the country,” said Ben Simpfendorfer, an economist and China specialist with Royal Bank of Scotland in Hong Kong.

Now a bustling metropolis of 8.6 million, crammed with ports, skyscrapers, top global manufacturers and its own stock exchange, back in 1980 Shenzhen was no more than a bucolic backwater of 30,000 villagers living off paddy fields and the sea.

“There were only two or three roads then, it was a poor, backward far-flung small village,” said Xu Zongheng, Shenzhen’s mayor in a recent speech.

Eventually, the article tails off into poli-babble of the sort popular among the ideologues who did such a wonderful job of “transforming” Russia’s economy – placing political reforms above the economic capacity to afford them.

Frankly, I’m still wonder-struck at how quickly Deng was able to set such enormous changes in motion in such a short period of time.