At a convention center on the outskirts of Beijing, hundreds of founders and tech enthusiasts gathered to pitch start-up ideas, network, and wander through booths showcasing arthroplasty robots and industrial drones. The city’s science parks and incubators were especially proud to display success stories of the foreigners in their ecosystems.
“Enter our start-up competition!” a representative from one Beijing incubator encouraged me, without asking if I had a business idea.
The HICOOL Global Entrepreneur Summit is one of the many events around the city that the municipal government and talent organizations have sponsored recently in a renewed push to raise Beijing’s visibility as a competitor for global talent. It’s been nearly two years since China ended its zero-COVID policy, during which the country remained closed to international visitors for three years.
This year’s summit reflected a clear message: China is now serious about attracting foreign talent, especially in the tech space.
Professor Denis Simon, the president of Alliance of Global Talent Organizations (AGTO) and a visiting professor at Duke, spoke at the HICOOL summit, which he said saw a new level of enthusiasm this year compared to last. While China’s global talent aspirations have felt a hit from the souring of China-U.S. relations and lagging foreign student numbers, promotional efforts like HICOOL indicate a global talent strategy in China is “percolating,” Simon said.
Beijing, Shenzhen, Tianjin, and Shanghai have been specially designated as global talent hubs. Their governments have been testing strategies to expand protocols to help foreigners work in China. This year for instance, Beijing scrapped a two-year work requirement for foreigners seeking to obtain a work visa, a policy that had previously forced many foreigners at Chinese universities back to their home countries post-graduation. Simon said such incremental strategies are typical of Chinese policymaking: “You start with one or two steps forward, you see what the response is, and you go two more steps ahead.”
Rocky Li, a Hong Kong national and founder of Terracotta, a start-up focused on cybersecurity, attended the HICOOL summit. He said there are a lot of incentives for entrepreneurs in Beijing, especially for people from Hong Kong and Macao, who can freely work in China. “You can get all kinds of entrepreneurial support,” he explained, pointing out that incubators in Beijing often offer rental subsidies or computing credit for AI start-ups. However, he also notes that entrepreneurial policies and subsidies are sometimes more geared to local entrepreneurs and native Chinese speakers. “Because you have all these complex policies and regulations, there’s a bit of bureaucracy that you have to get through.”
Leonardo Regis, a Brazilian Ph.D. student with the Guanghua School of Management at Peking University, hopes to launch an ed-tech start-up focusing on a software for language learning. Regis sees Beijing as an ideal place to settle compared to his home country because of the many incubators and incentives for foreign entrepreneurs in the city.
“They want to retain you,” he said, referring to the city’s entrepreneurial support offices and talent bureaus, “but you need to actually do something that creates that value… produce economic growth.”
The threshold to qualify for a work permit in China is driven by economic concerns. Launched in 2017, China’s points system requires foreign work permit applicants to qualify on factors such as work experience, salary, and language level. Applicants fall into either Class A (“high-level talents” to fill urgent labor market needs), Class B (technical experts), or Class C (temporary or seasonal workers). In 2023, China issued 711,000 resident permits, amounting to 85 percent of pre-pandemic 2019 levels, according to the National Immigration Administration.
China’s fight for global talent is not new. In 2015 and 2016, Beijing and Shanghai relaxed permanent residency rules aimed at the high-tech sector and entrepreneurship circles. The “Thousand Talent Program” launched in 2017 was another national initiative to bring in overseas talent, but has generally targeted the highest end of talent with a focus on overseas Chinese, not foreigners. Since then, the Beijing Municipal Government has tweaked its system of evaluating talent, opening up to some skilled professionals outside the highest talent thresholds, especially with the aim of further developing Zhongguancun, a science and technology zone in Beijing.
Mabel Lu Miao, Ph.D., co-founder and secretary general of the Center for China and Globalization (CCG) and deputy director general of the AGTO, sees conventions like HICOOL as a way for the municipal government to get attention from talents worldwide, but she wants to see China implement more robust policies to accompany these promotional efforts. She regularly makes policy recommendations for the expansion of talent mobility and advises the Beijing government. “The barrier should be lowered…not just for so-called high Nobel prize winners, but also the regular students staying in China. Those students are a big force,” she argued.
Yet the threshold to qualify as an eligible “high-level talent” and get hired as a foreigner remains challenging to clear for most non-Chinese. “You’re competing with locals who speak better Mandarin and understand the country better than almost every foreigner ever will,” said Koen Smeets, a Dutch graduate of Yenching Academy at Peking University who is currently studying for his second master’s degree at the Silk Road School of Renmin University in Suzhou.
“Unless a company is focused on going out, it often doesn’t make a lot of sense to actually hire a foreigner,” he continued, referring to China’s “going out” strategy to push companies to invest overseas as part of the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI).
Reflecting that push, some university programs for foreigners are not only training students to work in China, but are preparing students to return to their home countries with a knowledge of China to act as a bridge – a priority for the BRI. The Silk Road School is one such program that has created a new model of international talent training. The school aims to “welcome all talents from China and abroad, [and] cultivate elites for the BRI,” according to a message from the dean on the school’s webpage.
China’s global talent push has started to get traction, said Simon, pointing out that the HICOOL entrepreneurship competition attracted participants from 124 countries and regions this year. Still, he mused, China faces a long road ahead in transforming its global talent landscape.
“The conspicuous thing was that there weren’t that many Americans at HICOOL. It’s a telling sign that the situation they’re facing is a challenging one.”