Beyond the Silicon Valley Model, taking FAMILY seriously (成家立业) in attracting returnees (海归:)

[Yifei Sun]

Dear all friends,

Here are some discussion on attracting returnees in our "S&T and
Innovation in China" group on lInkedIn. Hope you can I've me some
comments. I plan to present a paper in Pujiang Innovation Forum.

Beyond the Silicon Valley Model, taking FAMILY seriously (成家立业) in
attracting returnees (海归:).

Attracting talents, particularly overseas Chinese, has becoming
increasingly important in China's development policies. From the "1000
Talents Program" at the central government, to the various programs
initiated by various local governments including Wuxi's "530 Program",
Nanjing's "321 Program", among many others. Are current policies
effective? How to improve them/ I have thought about this for a while.
Here I am sharing with you some preliminary thoughts.

In China, both the central and local governments have tried to learn
from the "Silicon Valley Model" and they have tried very hard to
create and build more "Silicon Valleys" in China. Good example include
Beijing's ZGC and Shanghai's Zhangjiang High-Tech Park. The focus of
current policies has been targeting at 'Chuang Ye' (创业). Those
programs are very good and very attractive in many aspects.

However, in order to succeed and attract more HIGH-END TALENTS, China
needs to take an approach that goes beyond the 'Silicon Valley" model
and needs to have a more holistic and comprehensive approach to
attract overseas talents. The key idea is to take "FAMILY" seriously
in the process , in building a favorable environment to attract
overseas talents. In Chinese, we have a say: "成家立业" (Forming a Family
and Building Your Career). As individuals, we need to take family
first. without a safe and enjoyable family life, it is hard to imagine
that someone will have a successful career. Many returnees are
tortured by the need to balance career (biz) and family life...There
are a few approaches. At the very beginning, they work as astronauts:
1) shuttling between China and foreign countries where their families
are located. 2) Later, some returnees cannot endure this and have to
return to the country where the family is living. 3) Some families
have ended up in divorce or extramarital fairs, or 4) a few have a
family union in China (happy ending). However, the final case is only
the minority and the first three modes are dominant. For a large scale
program to attract overseas talents, the result is not something that
the government is willing to see: only a few returnees choose to stay
in China, at least for the time being...So, we need to take "family"
seriously" in this prices and we need to come up with more effective
policies that will help returnees to build and sep their happy
"families". Without taking "families" seriously, these policies will
not be effective, I believe.

China has come up with many policies. However, most of the policies
have focus on the "hardware" （硬件）, while the software (软件）is not
emphasized enough. The government needs to realize that policies
focusing on hardware will not be enough to have sustainable
development. Funding and other support from the hardware aspect are
not enough, even not critical for the business of returnees (or any
business) . More important is the software: the policy and cultural
environment. To some degree, encouraging innovation and creativity,
among others, is more critical than hardware support for biz success.

Combing the above two threads of discussion, I have come up with four
types of policies: Hardware-Family, Software-Family, Hardware-
Biz(career), and Software-Biz (Career). we can see that most Chinese
policies are in the category of hardware-Biz, while only few policies
have dealer with the other three categories...

Your comments are more than welcome...Also, any suggestion of specific
policies in the four categories are appreciated.

Again, for those who are not part of the group, you are more than
welcome to join us.

http://www.linkedin.com/groups?gid=4457723&trk=hb_side_g