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 从罗先生的创业看上海三万海龟 |
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华尔街日报
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作者：游客 在 海归商务 发贴, 来自【海归网】 http://www.haiguinet.com
China Reforms Bring Back Executives Schooled in U.S.
By JONATHAN KAUFMAN
Staff Reporter of THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
SHANGHAI -- When Ying Luo left China in 1986 to attend graduate school in
the U.S., friends thought he would never come back. "They all came to the
airport to see me off," recalls Mr. Luo. "My best friend from high school
said, 'I will never see you again.' "
Over the next 15 years Mr. Luo earned a Ph.D. in biomedical science and
worked at several California pharmaceutical companies. He became an American
citizen and bought a home in Silicon Valley. His salary passed $100,000 a
year. He married a woman who had also emigrated from China, had two boys and
enrolled them in private school near Stanford University. His parents moved
from China to Berkeley to be near their grandchildren.
Then last year, without consulting his family, Mr. Luo decided to move back
to China. It wasn't patriotism or homesickness that drew him, but $3.4
million in Chinese venture-capital funding.
"I'm here to pursue my dreams," says Mr. Luo, 37 years old. "Everyone has
feelings about their homeland, to go back to their roots. But business is
business."
Reversing decades of exodus, some of China's best and brightest are
returning from overseas to take part in the Chinese gold rush. Reforms in
China, coming at the same time the U.S. economy is stagnating, are
convincing some successful Chinese executives that their hottest prospects
are in their homeland. For them, China shimmers with the same promise
Silicon Valley offered 10 years ago.
The fact that China seems so attractive to entrepreneurs illustrates the
nation's changing attitude toward business. People such as Mr. Luo are being
wooed by Chinese government officials offering free plane tickets, hotel
rooms and venture-capital funding. Five years ago, China didn't have local
venture-capital firms. Today it has about 200, most of them backed by
government agencies, accounting for about half of all such financing in the
country. The Chinese government has set up more than 60 "returnee start-up
parks" in recent years and says returnees have created almost 4,000
companies.
Last fall, the Communist party enshrined in the Chinese constitution a new
ideology, dubbed the "Three Represents." It holds that the Communists should
represent the greatest number of people; advanced culture, and the most
advanced forces of production, including private businesses. The party, it
says, is no longer the vanguard only of the working class, but of all
Chinese -- opening the way for tycoons to join the Communist party and be
appointed to senior posts.
Opportunity at Home
Though the dot-com bust has slowed venture-capital funding around the globe,
many Chinese entrepreneurs see opportunity at home. About $420 million was
invested in Chinese start-ups last year, according to Zero2IPO, a Chinese
company that tracks venture capital. That's down about 20% from 2001, but
still strikes returnees as a more promising market for them than the U.S.,
where venture-capital funding plummeted to $21 billion last year, about half
of 2001's $41.3 billion, according to the National Venture Capital
Association, an industry trade group.
One sign of the importance China is placing on start-ups: President Jiang
Zemin's son, Jiang Mianheng, has been involved in several new ventures and
one of the country's highest-profile venture-capital firms, Shanghai New
Margin Venture Capital.
Here in Shanghai, more than 30,000 returnees are working or starting
businesses; 90% of them hold doctorates or master's degrees from overseas.
Shanghai authorities expect the number to grow to 120,000 by 2010.
"China needs these top-level talents who not only understand China, but also
embrace advanced foreign concepts and technologies," says Hu Ping, an
official at the Shanghai Pudong Service Center for Returned Overseas
Students, one of several government agencies that helps returnees cut
through bureaucracy.
Overall, China is still undergoing a brain drain. About 580,000 students
have left to study overseas since 1979, when China reopened to the world,
according to government statistics. Only about 150,000 have returned. But
the number of returnees is growing. Last year, 18,000 overseas students
returned to China, double the number that returned in 2000.
Some are propelled by the slow job market in the U.S. Wang Fenghua, 31,
received a Ph.D. in economics from Boston University last May, after moving
to the U.S. in 1996. He applied to American universities for teaching jobs
but was turned down. He explored banking jobs, though pickings were slim. So
Mr. Wang took a position at the Shanghai Stock Exchange researching capital
markets. He says he makes about a third of what he would earn in the U.S.,
but that's still a good salary in a city where per capita income is about
$3,700 a year.
"Any job I could have gotten in the U.S. at an investment bank would have
been routine," says Mr. Wang. "Many of my friends are losing jobs on Wall
Street. They are having a hard time in the U.S. Here I can work at the stock
exchange, perhaps start a company one day. The sky is the limit."
Chinese who have worked at U.S. companies, such as Mr. Luo, are especially
in demand. Five of the six top managers in his new company are returnees --
most after living a decade or more in the U.S.
?FPRIVATE "TYPE=PICT;ALT=[Portrait of Ying Luo]"
"China has the opportunity for you to be superrich," says Mr. Luo, who hopes
to take his company public by next year through an initial public offering
in Hong Kong, Singapore or Japan. China currently doesn't allow IPOs.
For now, Mr. Luo's road to riches begins in a cinderblock corridor in a new
high-tech industrial park in Shanghai. An elegant wood-paneled elevator,
installed for the visit of Chinese President Jiang to a company on another
floor, opens opposite a set of Chinese style bathrooms, their smell
assaulting visitors as they step off.
"I haven't seen a good company bathroom since I came back here," says Mr.
Luo. He is overseeing construction of a new headquarters building. "When I
meet with the architect, I always tell him, 'I should not smell anything in
the hallways.' I want every visitor to feel there is a difference between
this company and others. I want a grand entrance and a clean bathroom."
Mr. Luo's company, Shanghai Genomics, uses genetic research to look for new
drugs. It also does contract research for other companies, taking advantage
of China's low labor costs. In the U.S., Mr. Luo paid Ph.D. scientists
$60,000 a year to do research work. In China, he pays Chinese-schooled
scientists about $8,000. "U.S. employees are generally better at innovation,
but they are not good at repetitive work," says Mr. Luo. "Chinese workers
are good at repetitive work."
The company, which employs 60, should become profitable this year because of
its contract work, Mr. Luo says.
Becoming a boss in China has been jarring at times, even for someone who
grew up here. Mr. Luo must rent a dormitory to house some of his workers and
subsidize their rents. He has been called in to settle housing disputes such
as whether employees can have their girlfriends stay overnight. "It's a
pain," he says. "I want them at work. I don't care where they live."
Mr. Luo must award bonuses of 100 yuan ($12) to employees who abide by
China's one-child policy and make sure every employee with a child gets a
similar bonus on Children's Day in June. "I'm like a godfather," he says. "I
take care of everything."
Returning to China runs in his family. In 1950, Mr. Luo's father was sent
overseas by the government in Taiwan to study engineering. After receiving a
Ph.D. at Utah State University, Harry Luo worked for the U.S. Army Corps of
Engineers. He returned to Beijing in 1960 because his mother was sick.
He brought back a camera, a black-and-white television and a record player
with more than 100 LPs. Growing up, Ying Luo remembers staring at an LP
cover picturing a Hawaiian beach and a beautiful woman sipping a cocktail
beneath a palm tree. "Someday, I will visit Hawaii," he vowed.
Over the next 20 years, leaving China wasn't possible. As travel
restrictions eased in the 1980s, Mr. Luo, a top student, left for graduate
work in the U.S., part of the first large wave of Chinese students to go
abroad. His stipend from the University of Connecticut was $760 a month,
more than 200 times what his parents were making at home. "There was no
reason for me to come back to China," he says.
After receiving his Ph.D., he worked at biotech companies, including Rigel
Inc., in South San Francisco, where he rose to be senior director of
Genomics, overseeing 30 people and making more than $100,000 a year. His
wife, who he met in the U.S., was a software engineer who left China in 1991
and became a manager at Cisco Systems Inc., with a six-figure salary, stock
holdings and options. She talked about retiring at 45.
Mr. Luo, however, was frustrated. Silicon Valley in the 1990s was an
"entrepreneur-rich environment," he says. "But if I looked at my future in
the U.S., I was going to be in technical management for the rest of my
life."
In Silicon Valley, where people a decade younger than him were already
millionaires, Mr. Luo figured he'd never earn more than $150,000 to $200,000
a year. "In the U.S. there is a glass ceiling in corporations," he says. "I
don't call it discrimination. But the higher you go, the more political it
is. It was difficult for me to merge into business society at the top
level." He recalls a dinner he attended where senior Rigel executives talked
about movies they had grown up with in the 1960s and 1970s. "I never saw
those movies, I never even heard of them," says Mr. Luo.
As the biotech boom turned to bust in the late 1990s, Mr. Luo saw his
chances of starting his own company slipping away. "I just didn't have the
contacts," he says.
Then Jun Wu came to work for him. Mr. Wu left Shanghai to study in the U.S.
in 1987 and had worked in the U.S. for about a decade. Mr. Wu's mother was
Shanghai's vice mayor of technology -- a powerful contact. The two men
worked on a proposed Rigel venture in China but nothing came of it.
In July 2000, Mr. Luo was invited to Beijing with a group of Chinese
scientists living in America to lecture on genomics. After his talk, a
Chinese businessman came up to him and said, "I want to invest in your
company. I'll give you $1 million a year."
Mr. Luo told the man he didn't have a company and that biotechnology was a
complex business. "I don't understand it, I don't need to understand it,"
Mr. Luo recalls the man responding. "You are from abroad. I trust you."
It was too early to take funding from that man, but "I started realizing I
had a value," says Mr. Luo. He had U.S. experience in a hot field. The
Chinese government was targeting biotechnology as an area it wanted to
invest in. And he had good "guanxi," or connections, through his partner.
Over the next few days, Mr. Luo was wined and dined by government officials
coaxing him to set up shop in China. Mr. Wu's mother arranged meetings with
more than 20 government-backed venture-capital firms. "Everyone encouraged
us," he says. He returned to the U.S. and started writing a business plan.
"I didn't consult with my family, I was so determined," he says.
In early 2001, he left Rigel and began commuting to Shanghai. Donald Payan,
Rigel's founder, says he wasn't surprised Mr. Luo decided to pursue his
dream in China. "There is more running room [for him] in Shanghai than there
is here" in Silicon Valley, he says. "There are more resources and more
money to go farther there."
Within a few months, Mr. Luo and Mr. Wu had raised $3.4 million from Chinese
government venture capitalists. In May 2001, Mr. Luo rented an apartment in
Shanghai. His partner and his partner's wife moved to Shanghai. Mr. Luo's
wife and family didn't.
It's a tender subject. "My wife likes a stable environment where she can
raise the kids," he says. "I'm sympathetic to that; I like the U.S. life.
You know where you will be next year and the year after that, all the way to
retirement. It's very predictable. Here it's dynamic." His wife declined to
be interviewed.
Mr. Luo returns to the U.S. every other month to see his sons, ages 5 and 7.
"I have to do that so my boys don't forget what I look like," he says with a
rueful smile. "I feel guilty. It's the cost of my returning to China."
Though he misses his family, and the calm of the suburbs, he doesn't know if
he will ever return permanently to the U.S. "When I left China I thought I
would never come back," he says. "Now here I am. I can't predict anything."
In California, Mr. Luo's father, Harry, hopes his son will come back in a
couple of years so the family can be reunited in America. "He has more
opportunities in China, but it's not a very nice situation, to be so
separate," he says.
Mr. Luo continues to recruit other returnees to fill his executive ranks. He
recently hired a Chinese student with an American M.B.A. who was having
difficulty finding a job in the U.S.
One evening, Mr. Luo relaxed at a restaurant with an old high-school friend,
Han Zhao, an assistant professor of business at Rutgers University who left
China in the 1980s and is visiting. Mr. Luo encouraged Prof. Zhao to move to
China, perhaps start a business of his own. Prof. Zhao demurred, pointing
out he has a family in America. But later he conceded he is intrigued.
"Back in New Jersey whenever I get together with my Chinese friends, a very
popular topic is opportunities in China," he said. "In Silicon Valley in the
1990s, it was the speed of change that got people excited. In China it's the
same thing. It's intoxicating."
Write to Jonathan Kaufman at
[email protected]
Updated March 6, 2003
作者：游客 在 海归商务 发贴, 来自【海归网】 http://www.haiguinet.com
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 从罗先生的创业看上海三万海龟 -- 华尔街日报 - (28190 Byte) 2003-3-07 周五, 00:00 (5359 reads)
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