Win In China Movie

Is a US Brain Drain on the Horizon?

In a recent YaleGlobal article, Vivek Wadhwa echoed some of the concerns I've had about Indian and Chinese engineers and scientists returning to their home countries. My observations have been anecdotal, while Vivek is now backing up this phenomenon with hard research.

Here are a few excepts from his article:

"Although India and China have long decried the "brain drain“, they have not been able to entice many of their ex-pats to return home. That appears to be changing, and fast. The reason is the strong economic growth rates in those countries coupled with enhanced entrepreneurial opportunities and rapidly rising standards of living and wages."

"The net result of this turnabout could be a drop in US innovation as more talent decides to return to their birthplace or that of their parents. Such a shift is good for China and India but bad for the US. That foreigners residing in the US contribute enormously to innovation is beyond dispute. My research teams at Duke University calculated that foreign nationals residing in the United States were named as inventors or co-inventors in one quarter of WIPO patent applications filed from the United States in 2006. Additionally, 16.8 percent of international patent applications had an inventor or co-inventor of Chinese heritage and 13.7 percent had an inventor or co-inventor of Indian heritage. By way of comparison, ethnic Chinese and Indians collectively represent less than 3 percent of the total US population."

"And contrary to claims that immigrant patent-filers crowd out US-born researchers, emerging research is increasingly showing that immigrants actually tend to boost patent output by their US born colleagues. These immigrant patent-filers emerged from the US university system, where foreigners now dominate the advance degree seeking ranks in science, technology, engineering and mathematical disciplines. For example, during the 2004–2005 academic year, roughly 60 percent of engineering Ph.D. students and 40 percent of Master’s students were foreign nationals."

"In a similar study of over 1,200 foreign national students matriculating in the US, we found that only 6 percent of Indian, 10 percent of Chinese, and 15 percent of European students said they want to stay permanently."

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U.S. Commerce Secretary at Pearl River Delta Conference

Speech by Gary Locke   2009-10-28 00:52:25

In the last few decades, hundreds of millions of Chinese have joined the global middle class as China has become a destination for capital, for ideas and for innovation.

We are one another's second-biggest trading partners.  In the past 20 years, U.S. exports to China have increased by a factor of 12; while U.S. imports from China have increased almost 30-fold.

Thirty years ago, Vice-Premier Deng Xiaoping chose a small fishing village not far from here as China’s first Special Economic Zone. Today, that village makes up Shenzhen, which boasts a population of 14 million people and is one of China’s most dynamic cities.

There are more than 100,000 factories that make every type of product imaginable – from iPhones and flat screen TVs to cell phones and high fashion apparel.

But we also know that the Chinese economy is increasingly moving up the global economic value chain, where growth is created not just by the power of a country’s industrial might, but also by the power of their ideas and their inventions.

The next critical step is for China to develop more homegrown entrepreneurs that sell high-value and high-tech products here in China and around the world.

A cornerstone of that effort must be a rigorously enforced intellectual property regime

Last year, firms based in Guangdong Province obtained more patents than firms based in any other single Chinese province. Guangdong Province has the potential to be China’s epicenter of innovation.  

In the past few years, China has taken several steps to protect the IP of American and other foreign companies operating within its borders.

For example:

·The Guangdong Intellectual Property Office settled 198 of the 199 patent-related complaints it received.

·There were nearly 2,500 trademark infringement cases of overseas rights holders in China last year, a 35 percent increase over 2007.

Strongly worded IP laws are only as valuable as the civil and criminal penalties people face for breaking them – and China’s enforcement of IP laws is often uneven.

For example, the U.S. government has received reports of occasional aggressive intellectual property law enforcement in Shenzhen, while receiving consistent reports of very lax enforcement elsewhere, including, unfortunately, right here in Guangdong.

In a few hours, I’m going to speak with students and faculty at Jinan University.

Like their American counterparts, many students at Jinan University don’t realize how soon they’re going to be out in the workforce as employees or as entrepreneurs.

And a few years from now, they too will count on a system that rewards those who create products and services that help citizens around the world lead healthier, wealthier and more productive lives.

Only a few years after the American Revolution, our third president Thomas Jefferson helped create the U.S. patent office because he understood two fundamental truths.  He knew:

·That long term economic growth was dependent on a continuous flow of new technologies and new ideas entering the marketplace;

·But he also knew that without a promise of ownership protection for these ideas, innovators would never be willing to take risks to improve upon the status quo.

In today's global economy -- where ideas are just as likely to be discovered in San Francisco as Shanghai – we need to do everything we can to incentivize and empower the brightest minds we have to solve climate change.

And that means we need to create the right protections for ideas.

Somewhere in the world, is the Bill Gates of clean energy, and we need to make sure he or she has similar protection.

Our strength is derived from many sources, but most of all, we owe our success to the ingenuity, intellect and creativity of our people.

The intellectual property reforms I have discussed today are an important step toward helping all our people reach their full potential and solve the problems that challenge us all.

Thank you so much for having me here.

Big Pharma Bets Big in China - Like BILLIONS of $$ BIG

A lot of Americans believe China lacks pioneering research in high-tech. They are wrong and big global companies are betting huge amounts of money on Chinese innovation and creativity in the decades ahead.

Novartis, the Swiss Pharma giant, is building a $1 billion RESEARCH center in Shanghai and hiring 1,000 Chinese scientists to do fundamental pharmaceutical research, as reported by WSJ 11-4-0

This new state-of-the-art laboratory will rival Novartis' US-based Boston R&D center.

CEO Dr. Vasella commented, " the investment was made possible because of the rapid development of scientific talent in China."

Maybe our perception of "rote-learning Chinese" is not so accurate. Novartis, Roche and AstraZenenca have bet a combined $2 billion on Chinese scientists in just the past 4 years.

Brain Drain Out Of Silicon Valley: Overseas Chinese return home to start companies

San Jose Mercury News

"TIANJIN, China — This city in northeastern China is a long way from Sand Hill Road, home to the world's greatest concentration of venture capitalists. But a deal too good to pass up led Yong Li to leave his family in Palo Alto a few months ago and head here to pursue his dream of starting a company, with backing from an unlikely source — China's newest capitalists, its Communist leaders.

"The government is rolling out the red carpet," said Li, who rides a rickety bicycle through an open-air market every morning and evening, grabbing wok-fried meals on his way to building TerraBay Pharmaceuticals, which is working on a treatment for lung cancer. "The government takes the risks. And there are almost no strings attached."

China has quickly grasped the fundamentals of Silicon Valley innovation: Daring investments in aggressive entrepreneurs create world-changing companies. Officials across the country are luring back Chinese-American technologists and executives — many from Silicon Valley — in hopes of seeding an entrepreneurial culture that they hope will some day create world-class companies. As the U.S. economy sputters, provincial officials are finding a receptive audience on tours to the Bay Area and other parts of America."

"If you go down the streets of Beijing and Shanghai, the most common word on the signs is 'innovation,' " said Bill Miller, co-director of the Stanford Project on Regions of Innovation and Entrepreneurship. "They call it homegrown innovation.

"They are really trying to push the country up the value chain," moving beyond manufacturing products to eventually creating and designing them.

Talent-poaching has picked up in recent months as Chinese officials descend on Silicon Valley on a regular basis. "Their selling point is this: China is a big and growing market. If you don't come to China now, five years from now may be too late," said Bin Lee, founder of the Silicon Valley China Entrepreneurs Forum."

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India & China - The Evolution From Low Wage Production to Knowledge Industries

Stephen Roach, chairman of Morgan Stanley Asia and author of The Next Asia: Opportunities and Challenges for a New Globalization.

http://www.mckinseyquarterly.com/Preparing_for_the_next_Asia_2452

"In the race to China, India may be the surprise sleeper. It has much to recommend it."

PRI Interviews "Win In China" Director on Chinese Entrepreneurs

Entrepreneurship is no longer a dirty word in China. Select businessmen, and a handful of women are now held up as powerful icons.

In China’s major cities these days, highway billboards featuring real estate and tech moguls who emerged from poverty have replaced many of the massive tributes to Chairman Mao and heroic workers.

Filmmaker Ole Schell traveled to the city of Weifang in Shandong province, to profile an up-and-coming lingerie baron and a member of a new generation of high-profile Chinese entrepreneurs.

Listen to his report:

 

What Is Communism? Chinese Answer: Ah...Um...Beats Me!

I have been watching the excellent DVD series "Doing Business in China" by James Fallows. What it illustrates is Americans' view of China is way off base.

Things are not as they seem there and James Fallows offers very keen insight and observations. I recommend his DVD's for anyone wanting to "catch up" with reality in China.

Here's a clip of one of his and my favorites:

Love in China - You must remember this, a kiss is just a kiss, a sigh is just a sigh. ...as time goes by.

James Fallows - Doing Business in China: Kissing in Public

All I'll say about this clip, next in the Doing Business in China series, is that I did in fact frequently patronize the Haagen-Dazs stores shown in Shanghai to get presents of ice cream for my wife. The clip explains why this makes me a romantic-hearted person. The fashion show at the end also gives a little glimpse of why it can seem, well, incomplete to refer to modern China as only a grim land of sweatshops, or a culture under careful control by the central government, et cetera.

Government and Entrepreneurship: The Evolution of Entrepreneurship in China

Comparing Development in India and China - The Trade-Offs