http://www.canada.com/search/story.aspx?id=b76a5308-4dce-4066-9ead-d16085706134
Going home
Booming China makes a play for ex-pats burned by North America's tech recession
James Bagnall
The Ottawa Citizen
Thursday, March 06, 2003
CREDIT: Lynn Ball, The Ottawa Citizen
China's burgeoning tech industry is looking to ex-pats such as George Dai to fill its ranks. This ex-Nortelite is heading back to Shanghai where he expects to be offered a job helping to attract foreign investment.
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On a brilliant Saturday morning in early March, dozens of native Chinese engineers form two separate lines in a conference room in Kanata's Holiday Inn.
It's an eclectic, talkative group. Strains of Mandarin, Cantonese and English intermingle. Some are dressed casually in jeans; others, eager to make an impression, wear pin stripes. Many are victims of the recent tech recession and are comparing notes about job possibilities here and the situation back in China.
At the front of the room, several interviewers from the Hong Kong-based Applied Science and Technology Research Institute are accepting r?sum?s aimed at filling several hundred new positions at the government-funded organization. ASTRI, which started operations late in 2001, has already conducted recruiting drives in New Jersey, Texas and California. Now it's targeting Canada.
ASTRI's mandate is ambitious. The 18 month-old Institute wants to become the catalyst for Hong Kong's high-tech industry in part by transferring original research to private industry and providing a test bed for entrepreneurs.
This is why it's looking for engineers with skills in esoteric areas such as photonics, semiconductors and radio frequency design. The Institute's recruiters collected more than 200 resumes during their visit to Ottawa and will decide later this month how many to interview in depth.
"There's no better place than Ottawa to find technology skills," says Henry Wong, who has been helping ASTRI find its feet. Wong is also the chairman and founder of SS8 Networks, a San Jose-based startup with an R&D group in Kanata and offices in Hong Kong. Although Wong significantly scaled back his firm's staff levels during the telecom crash, he has no trouble recommending the Ottawa region's talent base to others, especially if it involves someone from his home town of Hong Kong.
When ASTRI chief executive Simon Wong (no relation) approached him recently for help in hiring tech talent, Henry quickly arranged introductions. The result was last weekend's mini-job fair.
"Their first suggestion was to look in San Jose," says Henry. "I told them 'Don't be ridiculous.' San Jose doesn't have telecom engineers and Ottawa has a great Chinese community with terrific workers."
The surprise is that this sort of Chinese-sponsored job fair didn't happen sooner.
China's economy has been so hot, parts of its eastern seaboard have leapfrogged from 19th century technology to 21st in a matter of years. The country's major cities -- Hong Kong, Shanghai and Beijing -- are now in a race to attract brains and capital. The best hunting ground has turned out to be China's extensive ex-patriate community -- the tens of thousands who left the country to earn degrees and join high-tech companies in Europe and North America.
The tech recession has prompted many to consider moving back home in search of greater job security.
Consider the case of George Dai, one of the more plugged-in members of Ottawa's Chinese community. Dai, a masters graduate of the Beijing Institute of Technology, emigrated to Ottawa in 1999.
He had worked in a variety of jobs in China's technical community. At one point, he and a few friends launched a startup which integrated communications systems using components from North American firms such as Newbridge (now Alcatel) and Lucent. The venture lasted little more than a year, disbanding after Dai got his Canadian visa.
Once in Ottawa, Dai worked briefly on the assembly line at JDS Uniphase before landing a job at Nortel as a verification engineer. But, like so many of his Nortel colleagues, Dai was sacked early in 2001. His wife, Ning Fan, also worked at Nortel and hung on until late the same year.
Dai made a little money doing some consulting and established the Sino-Canadian Hi-Tech Exchange Association -- a networking group for Chinese professionals in the Ottawa area. The Association claims more than 1,100 members.
Discouraged by the lack of job prospects in Ottawa, Dai broadened his search last year to include Shanghai, which is near where he grew up. Things look promising. He's heading back to Shanghai this weekend and expects to be offered a job as vice-director of the foreign economic committee in the Zhabei district of Shanghai. His role: to help attract foreign investment into his district.
Dai, 37, isn't hugely conflicted by the move back home. "It's difficult for anyone in their 30s to become truly bilingual," he says. "Shanghai has also developed so quickly, the differences in living standard (between China and Canada) are no longer as big."
Indeed, the extent of China's economic progress comes as a shock to ex-pats who haven't been home in a while. Cailin Wei, a former Nortel employee with impeccable English, recently returned from his first trip to his homeland in more than a decade. "I didn't recognize parts of the city," he says of Shanghai, the country's financial centre.
Wei, who earned a doctorate in Belgium and runs his own consulting firm, found little difficulty attracting employment offers in China. "The difficulty is finding a job that allows you to keep your living standard," he says.
For example, Wei would want to keep his young daughter in a foreign-language school, which in China is very expensive. There is also the challenge of finding jobs that match the level of sophistication provided by Nortel, a developer of complex communications networks.
While China's telecom industry is growing more rapidly than that of North America, much of it consists of high-volume manufacturing. The more interesting job of building communications systems tends to be done offshore.
That's something that Hong Kong's ASTRI is trying to change. "It's a whole different ball game in Hong Kong," says Henry Wong, who travels back and forth from the former city state every six weeks or so. "They're looking for serious talent."
Outside the Holiday Inn in Kanata, Wong compares notes with Dai, who suggests they meet again in China. "Do you smoke cigars?" Wong laughs, "Well, then, all right."
In fact, these ex-pats represent perfectly the two faces of today's China. Wong is effortlessly bilingual, the product of a childhood spent in English-speaking Hong Kong and a university education in the U.S. He has spent the last quarter century in California's Silicon Valley, launching a succession of startups and amassing a small personal fortune.
Dai, the son of a peasant farmer, learned his English in school but never had a chance to practice it until he arrived in Canada. He is returning home bicultural, eager to reinforce the growing ties between the two countries. That much he and Wong have in common.
James Bagnall can be reached at
jbagnall@thecitizen.canwest.com
© Copyright 2003 The Ottawa Citizen
