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The other side of financial downturn

By Wu Jiao (China Daily)
Updated: 2008-10-28 08:51

She drives through crowded morning streets, zips past hundreds of thousands of people, seems to squeeze her car into the parking space, and rushes to one of the countless skyscrapers to start work.

Bridget Zhang seems to have planned out everything, except that she is not working in a country she had vowed to.

Zhang had left for the US after graduating from a top Chinese university and was determined to settle down there. But today, instead of being on a Los Angeles street, she is in the middle of China's financial hub of Shanghai.

The US-trained communications professional used to work for a Los Angeles-based multinational intellectual property rights trading company. But when the company started feeling the pinch of the financial crisis, she simply quit her job and found one back home in July.

"The Chinese are more vulnerable to the financial crisis because they often hold low level jobs on the corporate ladder in the US," she said, "and are thus more easy to lay off."

The 28-year-old is just one of a growing number of US-educated Chinese professionals returning from their "dreamland" to start businesses or get jobs at home.

It is natural for people like her to return home in these times, she said. Earlier they used to return to cash in on the vast opportunities their fast developing homeland offered. But now the global financial crisis, too, has hastened their return.

The number of resumes from people educated or trained overseas has increased by about 15 percent a month recently, said a Beijing-based headhunter surnamed Lim.

Government-designated development zones that enjoy industrial preferential policies have become the hot destination for some of the returning professionals.

Liu Li, deputy director of Tianjin Hi-tech Industry Park's administrative committee, has seen an increasing number of such overseas-returned Chinese visiting the park. The park has a group of cutting-edge industries in the center of the fast-developing northern port city of Tianjin.

"About 40 such people consulted us last year 15 of them settled in our park the number of people visiting our park has risen sharply since June this year," Liu said.

More than 50 people have visited the park for consultation in the past two months alone, and 17 of them have set up shop there.

Jimmy Chen, one of the 50 to visit the park, plans to open a unit there. The US-trained professional in biomedicine has worked in the US for more than 10 years. He is the vice-president of chemical and pharmaceutical research & development with DOV Pharmaceutical Inc, and holds 11 US-issued and 25 global patents.

"Till a few years ago China was not ready for drug discovery and development business. But I see a huge growth opportunity now," he said.