China woos talented foreign workers
China is setting up its first immigration office, according to people with knowledge of the plans, as President Xi Jinping seeks overseas talent to help drive the transition of an economy led by consumer spending and innovation.
Public Security Minister Guo Shengkun, who doubles as a state councillor, disclosed the move earlier this year at an internal meeting about a wider overhaul of domestic security services, said the people, who asked not be identified because the plans are not public.
The office would be created by merging and expanding the ministry’s border control and exit-entry administration bureaus and could be set up before the end of the year, they said.
It’s the latest sign that China sees recruitment of foreign workers as a way to help shake its dependence on manufacturing and investment and avoid the “middle-income trap” that has stalled developing economies from Asia to South America.
Almost four decades after Deng Xiaoping began opening China to the world, about 600,000 foreigners live in the Communist-led country, a tiny fraction of its almost 1.4 billion population. Japan, by comparison, has 2.17 million foreigners.
“China didn’t need to do that over past decades because it had double-digit growth simply by enjoying the demographic dividend,” said Wang Huiyao, president of the Center for China and Globalization. “But now it needs a new dividend of foreign talent to help support economic growth.”
Besides needing expertise, the country faces a long-term demographic squeeze as the population ages. The government replaced its one-child policy with a twochild limit last year after the working-age population shrank for the first time in two decades.
It’s unclear exactly who the new Chinese immigration office would seek to attract. While Xi has urged a general increase in international talent exchanges, his public remarks have focused on overseas Chinese, particularly those who left the country for an education and never came back.
Strict visa rules, heavy pollution and weak rule of law are among the factors complicating any efforts by China to lure overseas workers. Fewer than half of the 2.6 million students sent abroad between 1978 and 2012 returned, according to the Xinhua News Agency.
Similarly, a study by the Center for China and Globalization released last year found that only 7,300 foreigners had secured permanent resident status in the first decade of its availability. The government has broadened the categories of people eligible for a Chinese green card, highlighting foreigners working in innovation-focused careers in laboratories and technology centres.