China’s war for technology talent is intensifying. Tens of thousands of people are being hired to shore up cybersecurity, help censor online content and try to make China No. 1 in the application of artificial intelligence (AI), as capital pours into both start-ups and more mature businesses at a time when the Chinese government is demanding rapid development.
“Companies are well-funded and are in serious competition for talent,” said Thomas Liang (梁培華), a former executive at Chinese search giant Baidu Inc (百度) who is now running an AI-focused fund.
He said that start-ups in hot sectors like AI often have to offer 50 to 100 percent pay raises to attract employees away from established technology firms.
Photo: Bloomberg
China’s emergence as a global center for technology, with champions such as Alibaba Group Holding Ltd (阿里巴巴) and Tencent Holdings Ltd (騰訊) now worth more than US$1 trillion combined, has led to a hiring boom and wage growth that starts to put top salaries within striking distance of those offered in Silicon Valley.
While that should please the Chinese government, as it seeks to create higher-paying jobs and move up the value chain, it could also add to income inequality in China as wages in non-tech jobs lag, and as the sector’s recruitment and income gains tend to be concentrated in the biggest cities such as Beijing and Shenzhen.
Technology is certainly a major driver of growth in China. Output in China’s information technology and software sector expanded by 33.8 percent year-on-year in the fourth quarter of last year, compared with 29 percent growth in the third quarter, according to data from the statistics bureau.
In China, top graduates working on AI can command salaries of 300,000 yuan to 600,000 yuan (US$47,066 to US$94,132) a year, according to tech recruitment Web site 100offer.com, while team leaders with three to five years of experience can make more than 1.5 million yuan annually. Many of these jobs are in Beijing or Shenzhen.
Liang said salaries in the industry have roughly doubled since 2014.
By comparison, an AI researcher in San Francisco makes an average of US$112,659 a year, and a machine learning engineer in the same city an average US$150,815, according to job search site Indeed.com.
For Chinese software engineers who have studied in the US, but worry about the effects of US President Donald Trump’s immigration policies on their chances of retaining visas, returning home is becoming more appealing.
Chinese tech firms have said that they actively recruit Chinese students from US colleges and many have opened offices in Silicon Valley to attract top talent.
The boom in AI work is prompting some engineers to retrain in China.
“I doubled my salary by making the AI jump,” said Song, a 26-year-old AI engineer in Beijing who makes about US$55,000 per year after taking AI training courses in his own time.
As a 26-year-old AI engineer working for Beijing ByteDance Technology Co (北京字節跳動科技), maker of the Chinese news aggregator app Toutiao (今日頭條), George is pulling down an annual salary of about US$60,000, but said that he might jump ship if something better comes along.
Both Song and George asked that their full names not be used.
The money is still pouring in. More than US$65 billion of venture capital investments were made in Greater China last year, up 35 percent from a year earlier, according to research firm Preqin Ltd, an all-time high and second only to North America, with US$77 billion.
Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) told the Chinese Communist Party Congress held last year that China will push for the integration of the Internet, big data and AI with the traditional economy.
This is all part of a government drive to move the Chinese economy up the value chain with a particular emphasis on areas such as information technology, robotics and energy-saving vehicles.
The Chinese government is also behind a massive push to use facial recognition and other technologies to track people on a national scale — the authorities have said that it will improve security and reduce crime, while human rights advocates said it is part of a giant surveillance state and will be used against activists and dissidents.
Among the fastest-growing tech companies is Beijing-based AI start-up Cloudminds (達闥科技公司). It plans to expand headcount by almost 40 percent this year from 400, human resources director Arina Li told reporters.
The technology hiring and wage rises are starting to show up in the wider economy.
After stagnating for several years, disposable income growth in China last year accelerated to 7.3 percent, according to official data published last week.
However, the gains are much greater for those in the country’s burgeoning tech hubs — Beijing, Shenzhen, Shanghai and Hangzhou — where the disparity with average salaries mirrors trends seen in San Francisco.
However, it is not all roses in China’s labor market, as high-paying tech jobs are only available to a tiny slice of the overall workforce, and even official surveys show declining employment in both the manufacturing and services industries.
The high salaries in the tech industry far outpace typical income levels in China, where average per capita disposable income was just 25,974 yuan last year, China’s statistics bureau said last week.
“Don’t forget that in 2018, [China] is going to have 8.2 million fresh university graduates. Those guys need a job. So from my point of view the pressure to create enough jobs is still there,” said Qu Hongbin (屈宏斌), Greater China chief economist at HSBC in Hong Kong.
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