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Chinese Workers Abandon Silicon Valley for Riches Back Home (bloomberg.com)
From a report on Bloomberg: U.S.-trained Chinese-born talent is becoming a key force in driving Chinese companies' global expansion and the country's efforts to dominate next-generation technologies like artificial intelligence and machine learning. Where college graduates once coveted a prestigious overseas job and foreign citizenship, many today gravitate toward career opportunities at home, where venture capital is now plentiful and the government dangles financial incentives for cutting-edge research. "More and more talent is moving over because China is really getting momentum in the innovation area," said Ken Qi, a headhunter for Spencer Stuart and leader of its technology practice. "This is only the beginning."
Chinese have worked or studied abroad and then returned home long enough that there's a term for them -- "sea turtles." But while a job at a U.S. tech giant once conferred near-unparalleled status, homegrown companies -- from giants like Tencent to up-and-comers like news giant Toutiao -- are now often just as prestigious. Baidu Inc. -- a search giant little-known outside of China -- convinced ex-Microsoft standout Qi Lu to helm its efforts in AI, making him one of the highest-profile returnees of recent years.
Chinese have worked or studied abroad and then returned home long enough that there's a term for them -- "sea turtles." But while a job at a U.S. tech giant once conferred near-unparalleled status, homegrown companies -- from giants like Tencent to up-and-comers like news giant Toutiao -- are now often just as prestigious. Baidu Inc. -- a search giant little-known outside of China -- convinced ex-Microsoft standout Qi Lu to helm its efforts in AI, making him one of the highest-profile returnees of recent years.
Universities will not re-think allowing so many foreign students to take the seats of Americans.
E Proelio Veritas.
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and living expenses. The nice thing about foreign students isn't just that they pay more, it's that they have the money to pay. We've been cutting federal funding to Public Us non-stop since Clinton. Hell, I was there in the mid 90s when my school's paper started talking about how the cuts meant tuition would be over $10k by 2020. They were wrong, we passed that milestone in the mid 2000s. The schools didn't get that much more expensive to run either. Nor did the salaries go up all that much (the admin staff always made a tidy sum). We cut the funding, and it had to come from somewhere. Those tax cuts don't really pay for themselves, ya know.
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Imagine that. A communist country overtaking a capitalist country in terms of innovation and quality of living. This goes against many discussions I have had here.
Laws are rules for the court, but merely a bottom bar to hit for life. Think beyond laws in your actions always.
I don't know why people are getting mad or anxious about this.
It's a totally normal and expected development. People came here for the money (and a little prestige) and now that their own country has developed are finding they can get a better deal back home.
That's all there ever was to it. It's not as if they considered the USA their "homeland" or anything like that. So I must agree to some extant with the posters who say they won't be missed. America was just a hotel to them.
We do a lot of business in China, and to retain good employees we basically pay double the going rate. If you are talented, you can command a big premium there. I wouldn't want to be a worker on the factory floor, but skilled technical people can do very nicely.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
double the going rate of US?
sign me up.
No. China. You can live very well in China for a lot less than you can in Silicon Valley.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
It is absolutely true that Chinese stuff *has been* inferior copied CRAP.
But... you don't expect that to be true FOREVER, do you?
If you are old enough, consider the development of Japan. After WW2, they produced pure junk, and badly copied junk at that. In the 1970s Made in Japan was the punchline that Made in China is now. But by 1980, Japanese was a solid brand. Innovation too. The thing is, first you crawl, then you walk, then you run. China is no longer in the crawling phase.
Don't worry. India still does not want the Sea Turtles back. So there will be enough Indian Americans to keep America on top.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
Have taught us well
Sorry to self-reply, but I'll add that China's labor costs are much higher than they used to be. You can only play the game of cheap exporter of junk when your costs are also really low. China will have to step up in quality because they will have to start charging more. At what point in time this will happen, I don'gtknow.
Chinese culture is very different from Japanese culture. China has zero face. Negative face. China’s face is actually an ass.
not even a little bit. They're a Kleptocracy. Calling them communist a) gives their system of government more legitimacy than it deserves and b) puts a bad shine on Democratic Socialism, which thanks to a decades long campaign of attacks by various members of the ruling class gets associated with Chinese style Kleptocracy.
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Very droll!
I am sure that there are many other solipsists out there.
We could dangle financial success as the motivator for getting good talent over here. That's always been understood to be a temporary thing given that the rest of the world can only get richer. Passing laws over here that encouraged outsourcing wealth-generating industries like manufacturing to there hurried that along faster than was good for America, however.
"No worries!" proclaimed the coastal elistists, "for American freedom entices the whole world to flock here!" Well, in principle yes. But given the way Big Tech in Silicon Valley seems to be about as open and tolerance as Mao's China or Pol Pot's Cambodia (that's not as big of an exaggeration as it used to be, for you can now be fired and blacklisted from tech for your politics), we can't really claim that as an advantage either.
So let's look inward and ask ourselves an honest question: We've got money, we've got clean air and "green" but they also have money, and the comfort of the home culture and neither one of us has more freedom than the other, and while their schools don't measure up to ours (yet), our schools are at best a decade from all turning into Evergreen State. Berkeley has already fallen down that moronic rabbit hole. What do we do to make America a desirable place to be again? This is a practical question. The foreigners with means to leave are the canaries in the coal mine. Listen carefully and you'll hear people who already have power and influence (cough Bernie Sanders, cough cough) itching for policies that will turn this place into Venezuela. Venezuela used to be rich and no one would have thought twenty years ago that it would go so far down in such a short amount of time.
Louis XIV lived for a lot less than he would pay in rent in Silicon Valley.
I am sure that there are many other solipsists out there.
We do it because we have a lot of Chinese customers and so it helps to have software developers and engineers locally. Of course everything is ultimately driven by cost, so I guess you'd say we use Chinese employees to serve the local market because it is very cost effective. As you suggest, we did not open a factory there simply to save on costs to our other markets.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
in both cases, income inequality to the rescue.
Talking about shitholes and "street shitting", have you taken a walk in San Francisco lately?
I am sure that there are many other solipsists out there.
Again, quite droll.
I am sure that there are many other solipsists out there.
From the viewpoint that the US is not highly welcoming of highly educated US-educated PhDs and Masters from other nations, unlike most EU nations and Canada, it makes sense that they would return to China, where they don't prop up failing fossil fuel industries and have high speed rail, instead of trying to remain in a country in denial that it's the 21st Century already.
Now, this does point out that it would be in America's interest to encourage highly-educated US-educated PhDs and Masters recipients to remain, via expedited citizenship procedures, as occurs in the EU, UK, and Canada. But that's just an objective viewpoint.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
I find unmoved if the door hits em in the ass on the way out.
It was more in the 50s and 60s that made in Japan meant garbage. That started changing in the 70s when it meant inexpensive but good quality, and by the 80s made in japan was something to be looked for. Before WWII the Japanese did make high quality stuff but when your country is basically destroyed after a war and then occupied for 10 or so years it tends to be kind of shitty for a while as you rebuild and recover.
I am mostly familiar with this in regards to cameras and optics but I get the impression that most other Japanese industries were similar. While inexpensive at the time those Japanese SLRs from the really late 60s and 70s were really high quality being as good or better than others offered at the time. The lens quality that they produced was great for prime lenses back then which hasn't change much other than better coatings and some different low dispersion glass mixtures (no more thorium glass). Even the quality of work outsourced to them (series 1 Vivitars) which while not Japanese designed are basically as good as can be found now. I still use old Super Takumars (single coating, no thorium glass) from the 60s, SMC Takumars (multicoated optics and some have that wonderful thorium glass) from the 70s, and a Series 1 Vivitar from the 70s (if you don't know what these are and are into photography use one and see just how good vintage glass can be) on modern cameras. For those who pixel peep they are as good, when operated competently, as modern high end lenses and will curb stomp modern non-high end lenses. To be fair modern zooms are almost always better as are ultra wide angles that the old ones as they benefited greatly by the additional computational power that could be thrown at their design although there are some good older zooms from the 80s that while a bit slow are still pretty damn nice.
Time to offend someone
Just one more bit of evidence that the American Empire is failing. Hard times ahead, I wish we could be preparing for them.
Yep. We're aiming straight for a cyberpunk dystopia soon. I just hope that we get cybernetics before the collapse.
The soviets did get to Space first so not like being beaten by Communists is something new for USA
**Life is too short to be serious**
Not with the way the US is now accepting students for social reasons rather than actually only getting the very best exam results. Merit and academic skill was the pathway into a top US university.
Thats what made and kept the USA great. Only the very best got into a top US university after years of testing and only the very best grades.
Wealthy parents could buy into a university for generations but that did not alter the intake by using scholarships only for the best of the best. That did not exclude the very best from been accepted only after the best academic results over years.
Now its a failed generation been accepted on political correctness and for virtue signalling.
The best scholarships given out only to reflect wider US culture, not just the people who can actually study. Who have passed their exams better than most other people in real terms and who can and want to study. People who got the best grades without new political "considerations".
The benefits of been surrounded by random people who cant study and never will study is only in brand virtue signalling.
The US has nothing to offer now as it has weakened its once great educational system with party politics and by accepting a generation of failed students who cant study.
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
The CIA hoped the graduates would return home with ideas of democracy and change China within a generation.
China only sent over its smartest and most ideologically trusted students to the USA. They returned with all the US gov, mil, academic methods and did not change politically after years of study in the USA.
The best US education on offer was just used to build China up. The US educated its competitors for free always thinking it would export democracy back into China.
The CIA did not even get to tempt people to spy back to China for all that freedom, money, education and lifestyle on offer. The USA got nothing but debt after educating another nations students for generations.
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
For the tech elite, quality is good. Main issues is uneasiness about the government and being able to breath.
But for the bottom 80%, they are still an underdeveloped and struggling.
Mind you, I would not want to be poor in the USA either. But certainly the bottom 50% of non-US western countries lives better than most Chinese.
Not entirely true that the Chinese students did not pick up anything about freedom, democracy and the civil society. That is why the Chinese government has started to actively discourage western education as leading to "cultural incompatibility".
China is changing again, fast. And this time not for the better. Xi Jinping is taking them towards a dark place. Total control by a hierarchical party, enforced by all encompassing technology. Social media is a tool for control, not freedom, if used "correctly". An the AI the Chinese want is to control.
What will happen when, inevitably, the economy stops growing so fast and corruption becomes more obvious? When a leader claws his way to the top that is not as cunning as Xi Jinping, and causes grief. Unlike Trump, they cannot be voted out.
Taiwan is toast. But what about the rest of us?
Told you so
30 years ago when this shit started
it was self evident that the trade practice and techniques were going to go BACK and bankrupt the people who labored to create the industry
And the answer was always "We know what we're doing.
Better quarterlies now, and we'll buy them up later"
Well now they have bought up your profitable businesses, or put them out of business, creating wage stagnation and job insecurity even among your highly skilled labor force and they voted their anger, and now you have tRump and Putin running things
Happy now?
After 6 years here, they are U.S. trained.
Too late, all the versions are already in China, they are just cutting the middleman.
Not my American friends , they recently moved to Silicon Valley
The funny ones are the ones that cheer on their own downfall. Like this one.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
And the thing is, that is just capitalism at work. All those going back will be going back to deals like the one you describe. The ones that are not very good will stay in the US.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
Indeed. You start learning by copying. Also, quite a bit of Chinese stuff is pretty good these days, look for example to all kinds of steel-wares. They are still lacking in the very top quality range, but for most applications that level of quality is not needed.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
right? If I said I was the undisputed King of the World would you bow down before me and shower me with riches? Maybe I should try that...
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tax the billionaires who benefit from a skilled workforce to pay for maintaining that skilled workforce. It's called paying ones dues. They benefit the most from that work force so they bloody damn well should pay for it. By "exporting" education America's 1% no longer need to maintain funding to schools here. And it shows, they've slashed budgets non-stop for 30 years in the name of 'fiscal responsibility', all the while cutting their taxes via loopholes and offshore banks.
The reason to bring those folks overseas isn't to fund our education. It's exactly the opposite. It's so somebody else (them and their home country) can pay for it. This is also why we need so many H1-Bs. If you're not going to pay for Americans to go to school and instead rely on foreign countries to do it then you need import those workers too.
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When we're importing cars from Bolivia and microwave ovens from ex-Soviet republics, it will be because those are no longer cutting edge (and that will take some time with cars). We'll be manufacturing newer and more profitable stuff by then, in large quantities.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes