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Why China Can't Lure Tech Talent (bloomberg.com)
China may have been hoping to attract tech talent to its nation, but it is unlikely that people in the tech industry will move there. A columnist at Bloomberg explains why: The biggest problem is government control of the internet. For a software developer, the inconvenience goes well beyond not being able to access YouTube during coffee breaks. It means that key software libraries and tools are often inaccessible. In 2013, China blocked Github, a globally important open-source depository and collaboration tool, thereby forcing developers to seek workarounds. Using a virtual private network to "tunnel" through the blockades is one popular option. But VPNs slow uploads, downloads and collaboration. And it isn't just developers who suffer. Among the restricted sites in China is Google Scholar, a tool that indexes online peer-reviewed studies, conference proceedings, books and other research material into an easily accessible format. It's become a crucial database for academics around the world, and Chinese researchers -- even those with VPNs -- struggle to use it. The situation grew so dire this summer that several state-run news outlets published complaints from Chinese scientists, with one practically begging the nationalist Global Times newspaper: "We hope the government can relax supervision for academic purposes." The cumulative impact of these restrictions is significant. Scientists unable to keep up with what researchers in other countries are publishing are destined to be left behind, which is one reason China is having difficulty luring foreign scholars to its universities. Programmers who can't take advantage of the sites and tools that make development a global effort are destined to write software customized solely for the Chinese market. The author has raised several other reasons to make his case.
I am not sure they are really trying too hard in the first place. I speak Mandarin (have been studying for many years), have a good resume and appropriate technical background, and spent substantial time in China to have a general idea of how things are - yet I have never been able to attract interest of any Chinese company. Given what I know about their local tech workforce, that's not at all surprising. They have excellent pool of well qualified candidates.
That's not to say that article does not bring good points - internet use in China is encumbered and painful. But that's has little to do with "attracting tech talent".
Tone-based languages are a terrible idea; now, add to that a logographic writing system, and you've got a real cluster fuck!
The Information Age has no time for such nonsense.
From what I heard it is impossible to be treated like one of them if you don't look Chinese, even if you speak perfect Mandarin, socialize and marry a local, etc...
Permanent visas, let alone citizenship, are extremely difficult to get and some places don't accept foreigners.
I suppose this gets on your nerves after some time.
No sane person would subject him- or herself to living under an authoritarian regime with little freedom of speech, which is horribly overcrowded, and where breathing the air can literally kill you, where the food is generally horrendous, where grown adults spit all over the place, and where children have slits cut into the crotches of their pants so they can piss and shit in the street. (And no, I am not kidding about that last one. Look it up.)
I spent six weeks backpacking China in 2006 and it was an absolute nightmare. I imagine it's worse now that the pollution is truly out of control.
Hong Kong is good. Taiwan is good. Mainland China is a nightmare. (Shanghai is not the worst place on earth either. But that's only because the rest of China *is* the worst place on earth.)
Quote: "The biggest problem is government control of the internet."
WRONG! (properly capitalized)
The biggest problem is that China is a country with a dictatorship and that shit in Human Rights.
(Real) example: I'm gay. If I go there to work I'm not allowed to live (if I go to the street and kiss my couple, or even f**k at home, both get killed and the Government send the bullets bill to our families).
There are, as described above, many reasons...but I think the "main" reason for any particular person will depend upon the person.
I was once contacted by Huawei about becoming an executive at their organization, in Beijing. Now..this is curious to me since I neither speak Mandarin nor Cantonese. I find it hard to imagine that I would make a very effective VP in a technical role, without even a basic conversational grasp of their language. (And don't even think about reading...)
However, interestingly enough, I also have a background in doing cyber security for the military in which role I got access to quite a lot of things. So...yeah. NO WAY was I going to entertain the job offer, for even a millisecond.
But you know what? Even without that creepiness, I wouldn't have considered it because of the air pollution. I can't imagine exercising outdoors in a place where the air is so filthy you can taste it. Hell no.
For some people, a reason not to go would be the culture shock...but for me, that's actually a plus. Or maybe the food? Nope...I love exploring new cuisines, and have always been fantastically happy getting authentic local food in any country I've visited. The crowding? Uh uh...I'm a hardcore urbanite. But for some others, these would be downsides instead of upsides...it all depends on the person.
For your security, this post has been encrypted with ROT-13, twice.
What you're missing is that the Party members and their cronies own/run the coal mines and coal plants, too. It's not a communist system anymore, per se, but more of a state-owned enterprise that isn't even really socialism so much as it is "State Capitalism" ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... ). They could shut it off or switch, but the party and its cronies are making money off the current power plants, and don't want to switch.
So imagine what would happen if the coal mines and coal plants were owned/run by the same people who were best buddies with, and members of the same party as, the people who run the government. The government may well have the power to shut down those coal plants overnight, but it doesn't matter a damn if they're not going to use it.
The Asian countries take racism to a different level even though they are all basically from the same racial group. The Chinese, Japanese, Vietnamese, Korean (both north and south varieties), and all the other Asian racial sub-groups all hate each other. The sheer nuance of their racism is dumb founding when you consider skin color is not the primary means of identifying the various groups. And it would be one thing if you could blame the animosity totally on nationalism but their animosity for one another started centuries ago when most of the south east Asian nations didn't even exist.
If the Chinese have problems with their government it is up to them to do something about it. China's central government is more afraid of it's citizens than the citizens are afraid of the government. China's leadership know they are balancing their power on the edge of a knife. The more prosperous the citizens become the more dangerous the general population becomes and the Chinese government economic policies cannot be turned back to keep the peasants hungry, barefoot, and down trodden which was Mao's legacy.
And I have been lucky enough to travel around the world extensively as an American and I found the Chinese people to be the most welcoming and friendly. Although it could be that the Europeans I encountered in my travels were such total pricks across the board that they make the Chinese look like the open and socially accommodating country that the Europeans think they are. The US would be better off partnering up with China then putting up with the whiny Europeans whose last noteworthy contributions to the world was WW1 and WW2. China is probably one of the only countries on the planet that the US has never had a military conflict with. While the Japanese were rampaging across China in WW2 the US, who at the time was not considered a world military power, sent an all volunteer fighter squadron to harass the Japanese. It was a small contribution that didn't really make a military difference but the Chinese remember and even built a small war time museum honoring those US flight crews. They even had a display mentioning the US airmen who landed in China after the Dolittle raid. There would have most likely been no survivors of that raid if the airmen had not been helped by the Chinese living in the area at the time. Despite the press about tensions between the US and China over a few tiny islands, all of which could be destroyed with just a few cruise missiles, the two navies have held war games, conducted training for joint military humanitarian operations, and allowed Chinese sailors to come aboard US carriers to observe carrier operations they can use to train their sailors manning their carrier.
The Chinese spy on the US and the US returns the favor because that is SOP for every country of note around the world. France and the Israelis conduct more espionage operations against the US than China does but there is no talk of the US gearing up to take action against those two countries. The US has treaties with China's neighbors that all but demand the US say certain things when those treaty partners feel threatened by anything China does. China knows this and they also no what the limits are. The last thing China would ever want is to get in a military conflict with the US. They have made great strides in modernizing their armed forces but they are still no where close to being able to go toe to toe with the US Navy especially when you include the Japanese and SK military forces surrounding China.
I've lived in Shanghai and the most eye opening part about it is was how spectacularly wrong my American colleagues were about China. Before I left to live there, I was told how Communist it was, how dangerous it was, how there was no freedom. What I found was a country that is way more capitalist than the US and people pretty much leading the life they wanted. There are so many things that squash your freedom in the West but you don't notice it because you've known no better,