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Chinese capital dangles carrots to lure foreign talent to its Silicon Valley

reuters.com

81–90 of 110 posts

Re: Chinese capital dangles carrots to lure foreign talent to its Silicon Valley

#81
post #50

Anybody want a mini-AMA? Worked with Chinese for bigger part of my career and did two long term on-site consulting contracts. I lived in both Shanghai and Shenzhen.

Would you do it again? I hear mostly good things about living in China once you get past the culture shock.

Re: Chinese capital dangles carrots to lure foreign talent to its Silicon Valley

#82
post #6

Maybe, once Wikipedia and Gmail are available full scale.

Wikipedia isn’t blocked in china yet as far as I know. Internet censorship is a big deal for foreigners working in China, especially since playing the cat and mouse VPN game is so tiring.

Wikipedia (Chinese) is blocked, but you could circumvent by adding a few lines of DNS records for zh.wikipedia.org into your /etc/hosts. Sites for other languages are fine for a few years.

Re: Chinese capital dangles carrots to lure foreign talent to its Silicon Valley

#83
post #2

This is an interesting one. Is this related in any way to the "token white guy" types of jobs which are apparently available in China?

No. White monkey jobs are mostly over. Maybe you can find one in some remote tier 88 city, but not in Shenzhen.

this is crazy, I had no idea these even were a thing. It sounds like a Coen Brothers plot.

Re: Chinese capital dangles carrots to lure foreign talent to its Silicon Valley

#84
post #49
post #6

Maybe, once Wikipedia and Gmail are available full scale.

Honestly, the blocking doesn't make any kind of sense. You can literally create a vpn from within china itself on any cloud provider and surf on anything you want, in less than 10 minutes using softwares like algovpn. It's now a moment of truth for internet in china : either they start blocking vpns for real (although good luck doing that without collateral damage to the economy, because that would mean shutting down…

VPNs are now unreliable, they're using ML to detect traffic patterns that look like VPNs.

Re: Chinese capital dangles carrots to lure foreign talent to its Silicon Valley

#85
post #4

US-biased headline. This is what US-tech firms have been doing for years, dangling carrots on foreign talent. The same reason why the US VC-lobby has been up in arms on anything and everything work visas related. China is the new USA.

The difference is that US lures people to move and eventually become citizens. China want's people to work there, transfer the technology and go away. It's basically impossible to naturalize as Chinese citizen even if you marry a local and live there for decades. Japanese are strict in immigration but they take ten times more immigrants than China. Only about 1000 people get Chinese passport per year.

I agree with your comment, but it still is dangling carrots. Some soft, some hard.

Re: Chinese capital dangles carrots to lure foreign talent to its Silicon Valley

#86
post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ha! - In the article that smoggy image was worth a 1000 clear breaths on this side of the pond.

I guess you've never been to LA on a hot, windless summer day.

You can't even fairly compare LA in the 80s (where I lived) to Beijing (or Hebei) today, much less the "smogless" wonderland that is the valley of today. The winter smog (ignoring outliers like CNY or political events) is worse than you can imagine. Typical PM2.5 is in the hundreds... a bad day in the week might be 500, and once a year they break the instruments with 900+ measurements.

Re: Chinese capital dangles carrots to lure foreign talent to its Silicon Valley

#87
post #4

US-biased headline. This is what US-tech firms have been doing for years, dangling carrots on foreign talent. The same reason why the US VC-lobby has been up in arms on anything and everything work visas related. China is the new USA.

Except in the US you can actually integrate into society and be treated as an American[0], that's not true of China. [0]: I know there's still racism and discrimination, but if we're comparing to China let's at least compare the two countries on the same scale.

Consider for example what Asian Americans have accomplished in a relatively short amount of time in the US (most Asian immigration has occured in the last 40-50 years). Highest education levels, lowest unemployment rate, lowest crime & murder rates, highest incomes, highest household wealth levels, longest life expectancies (of any demographic in the US).

In how many large countries has something like that ever taken place (quite peacefully at that)? It's an exceptional testament to the ability of immigrants to contribute to the US, become integral to its success and be accepted.

Re: Chinese capital dangles carrots to lure foreign talent to its Silicon Valley

#88
post #60
post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Honestly, the blocking doesn't make any kind of sense. You can literally create a vpn from within china itself on any cloud provider and surf on anything you want, in less than 10 minutes using softwares like algovpn. It's now a moment of truth for internet in china : either they start blocking vpns for real (although good luck doing that without collateral damage to the economy, because that would mean shutting down…

The overwhelming number 1 priority of the Chinese Communist party is to remain in power and remain in control. Everything comes second place to that. Economically it would make sense to do what you say, but to do so would be an unacceptable loss of control over the ability to monitor and curtail communication in China, so they won't do it. Additionally, they do certainly have the ability to detect and shutdown VPN's…

"remain in control" is also what i thought, but then i changed my mind and now think the reason is now (almost) purely economical. The reason is that :

- google maps is blocked, but apple maps isn't

- google is blocked, but yahoo and bing aren't

- youtube is blocked, but other video sites such as rutube.ru are accessible, and just searching sensitive keywords led me to things like that https://rutube.ru/video/49d364dd24dc25c5855aa9113c107567/?re...

and the list goes on and on. Once again, it doesn't make any sense.

Re: Chinese capital dangles carrots to lure foreign talent to its Silicon Valley

#89
post #49
post #6

Maybe, once Wikipedia and Gmail are available full scale.

Honestly, the blocking doesn't make any kind of sense. You can literally create a vpn from within china itself on any cloud provider and surf on anything you want, in less than 10 minutes using softwares like algovpn. It's now a moment of truth for internet in china : either they start blocking vpns for real (although good luck doing that without collateral damage to the economy, because that would mean shutting down…

That you can (or have in the past) used a VPN does not mean that it is legal (or feasible now even with ExpressVPN). See this link for travelers below. Other than commercial "private" company VPNs which are themselves regulated in China using a VPN can lead to various forms of punishment and may not work as well as you would hope. It really depends on how you connect (e.g. mobile or wired), where you connect from (Beijing or Urumqi), and what you are viewing (english email or chinese video).

https://www.travelchinacheaper.com/is-it-legal-to-use-a-vpn-...

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