China increasingly attractive to foreign professionals (1)

It took Nikita Ermakov, a second-year Russian student at Peking University’s Yenching Academy, four months of job hunting and many interviews before he finally got an offer from the HNA Group, a Chinese conglomerate on the Fortune 500 list. He is currently negotiating the offer with them, and hopefully, he will start the job after graduation.

Ermakov, 25, got his bachelor’s degree at a university in South Korea and a master’s in Russia before coming to China. He has three years of work experience from his time in South Korea and Russia and can speak four languages: English, Korean, Russian and Chinese.

“China has become the new US, a new land of opportunities,” he said. “The US is a country of immigrants, but it is already a developed country. With President Trump’s new policies, the country has become stricter with visa and immigration regulations. China is still developing; it has a huge market.” 

Ermakov is just one of many foreign talents who choose to come to China for career development. 

According to the HSBC’s 2017 Expat Explorer Global Report in October, a move to China offers expats numerous career and income advantages. 

The report showed that China, as one of the world’s economic powerhouses, now comes in second in HSBC’s global rankings for career progression. A total of 70 percent of the 27,500 expats surveyed said the Chinese mainland offers strong job prospects compared with only 54 percent globally and 48 percent in Eastern Asia, a 16 percent increase over last year’s figures. 

Half of the surveyed expats on the Chinese mainland said they have more opportunities to acquire new skills here than at home, and they earn significantly more than the average expat – typically around $171,000 annually compared with $100,000 globally and $115,000 regionally, according to the report. 

Wang Huiyao, founder and president of the Center for China and Globalization (CCG), said China is now involved in “global talent circulation.” 

“There is a new trend in which more foreign talents will go to China to develop their career in the next decade or two. China’s international talent competitiveness is growing,” he said.