Career in China!

Wuxi is a very different city from Shanghai. Shanghai is a metropolitan with more than 20 million people. Skyscrapers are everywhere. Wuxi is much quieter and in my opinion more livable. That does not mean that it is not economically active. It used to be an area with major heavy industries. And now it’s trying to turn itself into a technology hub. The local government has pumped tons of resources to kick start a technology sector, including building several science and technology parks. As CMMI is a top priority service, my friend was invited to set up a consulting company there a few years ago to support CMMI certification of IT companies in the Yangtze River region. Although there were plenty of incentives, I do not want you to think it was an easy decision for a professional in Hong Kong to uproot himself from a city he had lived for most of his life to an entirely new environment. The fact that his wife and almost grown up kids are staying in Hong Kong merely illustrates his determination.

To operate a company of similar scale in Hong Kong, we may be talking about a few hundred thousand dollars per month.

This may be a topic professionals including project managers in Hong Kong have to think through. There are plenty of opportunities, both business and professional opportunities in China. The living standard in China is also rising rapidly. Are you willing to give up, at least temporarily, your nice and comfortable living condition, even your apparently higher salary in Hong Kong, to move to a fast developing economy? When I say ‘apparent’ I mean the real living standard in China, based on the decreased nominal salary, can actually be higher. An obvious example is monthly rental for an apartment. You may be able to pay only RMB 2,000 for an apartment in a newly built and furnished low-rise building with good living space and all daily necessities including appliances, air-conditioners, TV, Internet and phone. In Hong Kong the same apartment can cost you HK$ 25,000. Adding to that, there is a real opportunity for you to ride along the fast-moving economic train, making much more than you currently do in Hong Kong in a few years’ time. If you are lucky, you may even become rich (say the company you work for is publicly listed).

The next day I went to his office in one of the science parks. The park also houses a Carnegie Mellon Technology training school, IBM, and numerous multinational and local technology companies. My friend’s company was nicely located on the second floor of a typical no-frill (minimum but still nice renovation) building, with a reception area, an executive room, a reasonable-sized meeting room, and multiple cubicles. He hired around 10 employees. That’s almost a dream office for a small company. In Hong Kong if you want the same setup and number of employees you may be talking about HK$300K per month. But in Wuxi we are talking about much less, one-tenth maybe. I guess we can pretty much conclude that the high rental and salary level in Hong Kong really kills lots of industries, including those high end knowledge-based ones. Yes you may argue with me using those archaic no-intervention theories of free economy. But the truth is when property prices in Hong Kong would eventually go down due to lower demand, many industries would have disappeared. Maybe part of the reasons why property would eventually go down is simply nobody wants to live there anymore, hmmm…

Carnegie University has a campus in this science park.