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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.
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.
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
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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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.
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! --
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
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?