Chinese-born Wall Streeters find you can go home again
Chinese-born financial pros find new opportunities “In a mature market like the U.S., you have to wait for a long time”
For Shiwei Zhou, it was partly about the obligation he felt to join co-workers for after-work drinks and talk of ice hockey. William Su felt his career was stuck after four years in the same role. QJ Guo wanted to live closer to his parents.
All three are among the many
Chinese Wall Streeters who’ve decided to go back to their home country. They were drawn to the U.S. to study at top business schools or earn salaries they could never get in China. Now, U.S. firms are cutting bonuses and positions. And while financial concerns are mounting in China, many of these ambitious expats say they were hitting a career ceiling in the U.S. Meanwhile, China’s economic growth, while slowing, is shifting into areas that could benefit bankers.
China is developing beyond laborintensive manufacturing, which means “a huge demand for good brains,” says Cao Huining, a professor of finance at the New York campus of Beijing’s Cheung Kong Graduate School of Business. “A lot of people see better career paths in China than in the U.S., where they probably could just make a mediocre living,” he adds.
The Chinese have a name for returnees: hai gui. In Mandarin the phrase means “return across the sea,” and also sounds like the word for sea turtles. The turtles of finance first started swimming back in 2008, when Wall Street erupted in crisis. They were prized in China for their understanding of both Western business practices and the nuances of Chinese culture. Some joined China’s financial regulators.
The latest round of returnees faces a different environment. The government is encouraging entrepreneurship, and the country has created some of the world’s most valuable startups, including smartphone manufacturer Xiaomi and peer-topeer lender Lu.com. Venture capitalists poured a record $37 billion into China last year.
Chinese lenders are scrambling to expand their trading desks as the yuan moves fitfully toward becoming a global currency. The International Monetary Fund recently added the yuan to its basket of reserve currencies, a move Barclays estimates could increase global demand for the yuan by as much as $300 billion by 2020, even though the currency has weakened since August.
“In China, the sky is the limit,” says Su, executive director at First
Seafront Fund in Shenzhen. Su got an MBA from the University of Rochester. After four years as a Vanguard Group analyst in Pennsylvania, he sold his two-story house and moved his family to China in October. “In a mature market like the U.S., you have to wait for a long time for opportunities,” he says. “I didn’t know when my turn would come.”
And then there’s all that ice hockey talk. “It is just very hard to crack that because you don’t grow up in that kind of culture,” says Zhou, 40, who worked as an equities analyst at Manning & Napier in New York and Green Street Advisors in California. “How many Chinese play such sports?” He has joined Ctrip, China’s biggest online travel company.
Guo, 29, worked as an analyst for two years at CBRE Group, the world’s largest property services company. Like many Chinese, he’s an only child and wants to be near his parents as they age. Now he’s with a state-owned insurance firm in Shanghai.
None of the men complained of discrimination, although they felt it was easier for Americans to advance in the U.S. Statistics suggest there are barriers to top jobs for people of Asian descent. Asian Americans, some 6 percent of the U.S. population, make up only 2.6 percent of the corporate leadership of Fortune 500 companies, according to a study by DiversityInc.
Meanwhile, the offers in newly wealthy China are increasingly attractive. You can get housing subsidies and even a driver “if you are a top talent in the market,” according to Zhu Yiyong, director of human resources at Ping An Securities. The company will add as many as 30 jobs from overseas recruitment this year, Zhu said at a job fair in New York in November.
The picture isn’t entirely rosy, not only because some returnees must take care of aging parents. A stock market rout last summer wiped out more than $5 trillion. The government targeted the finance industry with arrests and investigations. Some experience a minor culture shock. “I’m used to the American style of planning ahead,” Su says. Meetings in China are often impromptu, “and people tend to be late,” he says. He also notes that house prices in Shenzhen rose 50 percent in the past year.
Tony Wan, a Chengdu native who worked as a quantitative analyst in New York until recently, says he doesn’t worry about the change. “The chaos is a good thing, because it means more opportunities,” Wan says, declining to name his new employer.
Still, not all sea turtles have swum back for good. About 5 percent of them will go abroad again because they’ll find it harder to fit into their home country than they realize, according to recruitment consulting firm Michael Page. Some will spend their time between their two countries. These people have their own name—seagulls, meaning those who remain uncertain which country is their home.
The bottom line China’s economy is slowing, but its financial sector has boomed. Chinese with Wall Street experience are in high demand.