Young foreigners make most of opportunities in China
Jay Thornhill was just starting out on the career ladder when he arrived in Shanghai 14 years ago, not knowing anyone in China and having no idea what to expect.
“I was just intrigued to experience life in another culture, and I felt China was a new land of opportunity,” he said.
Thornhill, from the United States, started off as an English teacher before moving into corporate training and eventually forming his own training consultancy.
In 2015 he and two partners, aware of the opportunities in China’s e-commerce boom and the difficulties expats faced in China while shopping online because of language barriers, decided to create a platform that would act as an intermediary between fellow foreigners and e-commerce websites.
Their Baopals platform went on to become a resounding success, with more than 5 million items sold for a gross merchandise value of 320 million yuan ($50.1 million) in the following years, and 100,000 registered users.
“China is a place where you can pull together resources, move quickly and scale up,” he said. “When you combine a huge, welleducated and hardworking population with the ability to manufacture and build just about anything that exists in the world, you get a very productive business environment.”
Thornhill is just one of many young foreigners who have used China’s dramatic economic growth of recent decades as a springboard for starting their own businesses or launching glistening careers.
“We have observed an increasing number of young people from other countries eager to come to China to explore opportunities,” said Miao Lyu, co-founder of the Global Young Leaders Dialogue and secretary-general of the think tank Center for China and Globalization. “Many, after having studied in China, have chosen to stay here to start their own businesses or find jobs.”
Miao said a key element of China’s attraction to young foreigners lies in its booming digital economy, with its top-notch infrastructure and sizable quality labor force offering fertile ground for starting new businesses and finding well-paid jobs.
China is also a top destination for international students, with its universities catering to more than 400,000 students to further their studies each year.
Peking University, where international students comprise 8% of those enrolled, has set a target of increasing the enrollment of foreign students to 10% by 2025.
Miao said many students have chosen to stay in the country after completing their studies because they realize the rich opportunities it offers.
Brett Lyndall Singh, a South African doctor with a master’s degree in pediatrics and the founder and chief executive of AOM Group, a company that
seeks to combat childhood malnutrition in sub-Saharan Africa, said the offer he was given to pursue a degree in pediatrics at Wenzhou Medical University in 2011 changed his life.
“The cost of education here was more than affordable, and the academic environment was also competitive.”
Over the years he has integrated into local life and developed a strong attachment to Wenzhou, a city in Zhejiang province, doing his clinical electives at a children’s hospital there.
He was also able to meet a group of friends from Africa, with whom he started his company in an effort to transform life sciences on that continent.
Many young foreign business leaders have said China’s enabling environment was another factor that prompted their decision to launch startups in the country.
Gaston Chee, the cofounder and chief executive of BeGo, an education firm preparing Chinese students for study abroad, said the country has always been welcoming to foreign investors, and his company was ready for business immediately after it was set up in Beijing in 2012.
“China has one of the most well-developed investment infrastructures today,” he said. “It has created a very welcoming investment environment, a very stable and robust economy, and is perhaps one of the safest countries in the world.”
Chee, from Malaysia, said China has become a melting pot of many nationalities, attracting global talent, and
his company has made full use of that.
“We were able to employ diverse nationalities of fulltime and part-time staff in Beijing and the United Kingdom who are bilingual and multicultural from virtually every continent in the world.”
Thornhill of Baopals said one aspect of China’s enabling environment is the fact that “the Chinese people tend to be very welcoming and accommodating toward expats”.
“They’re tolerant of language and cultural barriers, and usually approach these differences with curiosity rather than judgment. China can also be a very comfortable and convenient place to live in, with modern infrastructure, cheap and reliable transport options and arguably the best applications in the world for communication, shopping, payments and more.”
Thornhill’s company has experienced phenomenal growth over the years.
“We went from a team of three inexperienced young people planning for a startup in an apartment to a team of over 30 people running an e-commerce platform with hundreds of millions of products,” he said.
The company has been able to see sales grow without much growth in headcount because of improvements in operational efficiency, he said, and it has expanded services outside the Chinese mainland.
“The United States is the big market, but we should be shipping products to many countries before the end of this year.”