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Reuters found more than a dozen advertisements for Qiming applicants posted since 2022 on Chinese platform Zhihu and LinkedIn by people who identified themselves as recruiters.
In a February LinkedIn post, Chen Biaohua, who listed his employer as Beijing Talent Linked Information Technology, asked candidates eligible for Qiming and Huoju to email him their resumes.
The post said Chen was seeking “young talents” under 40 with a doctorate from well-known universities and overseas experience. He was also seeking applicants who held senior roles at foreign academic institutions or large companies.
Headhunting firm Hangzhou Juqi Technology posted an ad in March on ResearchGate, a social network for academics, seeking people with doctorates from top universities and experience at Fortune 500 companies to help recruit 5,000 overseas researchers for Chinese enterprises.
The ad described this effort as serving Qiming and Huoju, with each researcher able to obtain as much as 15 million yuan, or about US$2.1 million, in rewards. It said that anyone who recommends a candidate who is then selected for the talent programs would receive “diamonds, bags, cars, and houses”.
Chen and LinkedIn declined to comment. Questions sent to Chen’s employer, as well as to Zhihu, ResearchGate and Hangzhou Juqi Technology yielded no responses.
One foreign-trained semiconductor expert at the Beijing Institute of Technology (BIT) was identified on its website as a 2021 Qiming recipient. Ma Yuanxiao is an associate professor at BIT’s School of Integrated Circuits and Electronics, who did his masters at Britain’s University of Nottingham between 2013 and 2015 and his PhD at the University of Hong Kong until 2019.
Ma and BIT did not respond to requests for comment.
OPENING WALLETS
Across China, provincial and municipal governments are pouring resources into the recruitment drive, official documents show.
One initiative is the Kunpeng Plan, run by authorities in eastern Zhejiang province, whose 2019 launch was covered in state media. The Zhejiang Daily reported in June 2022 that the program aimed to attract 200 tech experts in five years, with 48 already recruited.
In the eastern city of Wenzhou, local authorities’ investment in each Kunpeng professional can reach up to 200 million yuan, including an individual reward, start-up funding and housing, according to a 2022 talent policy report by the city government.
A report by the Wenzhou branch of the Communist Party’s Organization Department, which oversees personnel decisions, said its total budget in 2022 increased 49 per cent from a year earlier, mainly because it had assigned 85 million yuan to Kunpeng and similar programs.
One Kunpeng recipient is Dawei Di, a Cambridge-educated professor at Zhejiang University whose research focuses on semiconductor optoelectronic devices, the university’s journal reported in 2021.
In Huzhou, also in Zhejiang, employers that recommend candidates to Qiming can receive incentive payments of up to 1.5 million yuan from the city or district governments if those people are accepted, according to a 2021 city directive.
None of the city, provincial or Communist Party authorities, nor Di or his university, responded to queries from Reuters.
“ONE FOOT OUT”
Despite Xi’s emphasis on advancing China’s chip know-how, two sources with direct knowledge of the matter said many Chinese semiconductor experts overseas were wary of returning because of China’s political environment and weaker position in chip development relative to the West.
“They have no idea if the programs could change overnight or lose government support,” one said.
Zhuji, a county-level city in Zhejiang, reported in October 2022 that it had over 200 applicants for talent programs, mainly Qiming, but only eight successful candidates from the previous year had returned to China. Zhuji government’s general office did not respond to a faxed request for comment.
Two people familiar with the matter said some Chinese scientists, especially those with foreign citizenship or permanent residency, worried that joining China’s government talent programs could mean forgoing international opportunities or becoming subject to US investigations.
In some cases, these people said, those experts will be offered roles at Chinese chip companies’ overseas operations.
“Safer to have one foot in China, one foot out,” one said.
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