worker checks a robot at the Chuanze robot factory in Zhangye, Gansu, on April 17." loading="lazy" class="image -fit-3-2">
A worker checks a robot at the Chuanze robot factory in Zhangye, Gansu, on April 17. STR/AFP VIA GETTY IMAGES
MAY 16, 2021, 6:00 AM
When Liu Chen (who asked to use a pseudonym), a leading engineer at Google’s TensorFlow artificial intelligence (AI) team, decided he was leaving the firm to move back to Beijing, his friends at home were confused. Chinese students flock to California’s universities and tech firms by the thousands to start tech careers. Nine out of 10 Chinese AI graduate students remain in the United Stated five years after graduation. But at the edge of this digital frontier, an emerging generation of Chinese experts—educated and trained in the United States—are heeding the call to join the project of national rejuvenation at home, where their Silicon Valley pedigree gives them intoxicating power to reshape organizations, industry, and culture.
As China’s tech industry has matured, major firms like Baidu, Tencent, Alibaba, and ByteDance have all established satellite offices in the San Francisco Bay Area, where recruiters compete for Chinese talent with firms like Google, Apple, and Facebook. They offer a workplace culture where their native language is spoken regularly and on-campus cafeterias serve Chinese cuisine. For many, it’s a staging ground before they take on senior roles back on the mainland. Chinese engineers and scientists power a lot of U.S. firms’ innovation but ascend to management less often than their Indian or European counterparts, increasing the allure of returning home.
Back at Chinese tech giants like ByteDance, Baidu, or Tencent, they’re a coveted talent group. “I got interviewed a lot internally … on Google’s software engineering and engineering culture,” Liu said of his arrival at Tencent. “ByteDance is copying Google’s engineering culture and some best practices,” he said of TikTok’s creator. “Baidu has always been copying Google.” Tencent, he said, also uses Google’s engineering style guide.
The Chinese tech sector’s relative adolescence means firms have focused more on rapid iteration at the expense of long-term product stability—a sort of start-up mentality writ large across the industry. “A lot of my friends do not have proper technical aesthetics. They only try to finish the job, but they do not care about if it is beautifully done,” Liu said. This deferred digital maintenance results in brittle codebases, security vulnerabilities, or dependencies on outdated third-party software that are difficult and frustrating to unravel. Veterans like Liu understand the methodologies necessary to address these systemic problems. “I think with more and more people like me coming back to China, we will change the technical culture in China.”
The size and power of Chinese firms drives much of their appeal to engineers. Tencent’s WeChat boasts more than 1.2 billion users and has become a de facto digital profile for Chinese citizens, facilitating everything from identification and mobile banking to health care and food delivery. ByteDance’s TikTok short video app has become a hit in the United States and Europe. Behind these behemoths are an array of medium to large enterprises often unknown in Western markets, many of which count Chinese local and regional governments and state-owned financial institutions as their primary customers. That’s been fueling the growth of a domestic AI industry that ballooned to more than a $75 billion market in 2018. The party intends to double down on this progress by plowing $400 million into the sector in the hopes of establishing China as the leader of AI by 2030.