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14 Migration of Chinese Professionals
- University of Nevada Press
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242 14 The Migration of Chinese Professionals and the Development of the Chinese ICT Industry yu zhou Robin Li (Li Hongyan) graduated from Beijing’s Peking University, the “Harvard” of China, in 1991. 1 Like many of the graduates from China’s elite universities at the time, he headed to the United States for a graduate-level education in computer science. Before he finished his Ph.D. at the State University of New York at Buffalo, he interned and worked for a number of Japanese and American corporations in the United States. During this time, Li made a breakthrough in Internet search-engine method and was recruited by Infoseek—once the leading Internet company—to be responsible for its search-engine development. In the white-hot Internet bubble of the late 1990s,Li decided to start his own company and was able to raise $1.2 million in v enture investments (Barboza 2006). Li returned to Beijing in 1999and rented a space in a hotel next to his alma mater, naming his company Baidu.com. (The name comes from a famous phrase in a classical Song dynasty poem, which describes the arduous search for beauty amid a crowd.) Initially, Baidu struggled for a few years because of China’s immature Internet industry, but by 2003, it had become China’s favorite search engine. In August 2005,it achieved international fame when it issued its initial public offering on nasdaq. The share price of Baidu, known as the Chinese Google, more than quadrupled on t h e m i g r a t i o n o f c h i n e s e p r o f e s s i o n a l s 243 the first day, setting a record for the best first-day performance of all foreign firms ever listed on the U.S. stock market, as well as the best first-day performance among all firms in the previous five years. While Baidu’s turn of fortune might have been exceptional, Li’s life trajectory is not. He is among the growing number of Chinese youth who, in the mid-1980s, began to go abroad to study or work, and eventually found that returning home could be an attractive option. In other words, Li represents the Chinese digital diaspora that is making a profound mark on the transformation of China’s society and economy, by bringing together the countries on their residential itinerary. Their experiences and inspirations demonstrate the tremendous impact of information and communication technology (ict ) on the diaspora population. Yet they have also in turn played an instrumental role in constructing global linkages. This chapter will outline the main patterns of the Chinese diaspora in the United States. I will focus on the stream of Chinese youth who went abroad to study and work, only to return to their homeland. I will also analyze the forces that drive the flows on both sides of the Pacific, and I will outline some of the opportunities and challenges that returnees face back in their homeland. The information of this chapter has been collected through documentation research and interviews, conducted mostly in Beijing’s Zhongguancun Science Park between June 2005and June 2007. I have interviewed mostly returnee entrepreneurs who have started up their own companies in Beijing as well as local government officials who are in charge of returnee affairs. A few interviews with returnee professionals also took place in Shanghai or over the Internet. the chinese professional diaspora in the united states Chinese migration to the United States has a long history. The significant Chinese migration first started arriving in the United States around the 1850s to work on the railroad and to make a fortune in the California Gold Rush. Composed mostly of manual male labor, the flow reached its peak around the 1870s,with 123,201 Chinese people migrating to the United States in the decade between 1870and 1880(U.S. Department of Justice 1991,1996). However, immigration was sharply curtailed by the Chinese Exclusion Act passed by the U.S. Congress in 1882.The law was the first U.S. federal immigrant law excluding a population solely on the basis of race. However, the Chinese Exclusion Act did not limit the entry of Chinese students and [44.206.248.122] Project MUSE (2024-03-19 05:10 GMT) 244 d i a s p o r a s i n t h e n e w m e d i...