Aiming to become a global leader in AI by 2030, China is backing its national AI plan with substantial resources.
In 2017, the year China published its “Next Generation Artificial Intelligence Development Plan”, the country accounted for 48 per cent of total equity funding for AI start-ups compared to 38 per cent funded by the US and 13 per cent by the rest of the world.
The US, with its superior higher education system, is the training ground for Chinese AI scientists like Zheng, who obtained a PhD from the University of Maryland after earning bachelor’s and master’s degrees at China’s premier Tsinghua University.
“Many professors in China have great academic ability, but in terms of the number [of top professors], the US is ahead,” said Luo Guojie, who himself accepted an offer from Peking University to become an assistant professor after studying computer science in the US.
Among international students majoring in computer science and maths in US universities, Chinese nationals were the third largest group behind Indians and Nepalese in the 2018-2019 academic year, representing 19.9 per cent, according to the Institute of International Education.
“[To build] the best universities is not easy,” Gunther Marten, a senior official with the European Union delegation to China, said on the sidelines of the World Internet Conference in Wuzhen in October. “The university is a free speech space, whereas in China, this is not the case.”
“China has many great universities and companies, especially in certain subfields of AI such as computer vision, but many people remain hesitant to move to China due to the political environment, quality of life concerns and workplace issues,” said Remco Zwetsloot, a research fellow at Georgetown University’s Center for Security and Emerging Technology (CSET).
“If you include pre-tax income, many of us get offers that pay more than 1 million yuan (US$142,000) a year but in China the salaries offered to the best batch of fresh undergraduates are about 200,000 to 300,000 yuan (US$28,000 to US$43,000),” Chen said.
Chinese authorities are investing heavily in the sector, with the city of Shanghai setting up a 10 billion yuan (US$142 million) AI fund in August and Beijing city government announcing in April it would provide a 340 million yuan (US$48 million) grant to the Beijing Academy of Artificial Intelligence.
“More and more senior people like me have come back, and some start their own businesses,” said Zheng, the Siemens Healthcare researcher who joined Tencent. “It’s easier for Chinese to seek venture capital in China than in other countries.”
Therefore, mainland companies have increased their attractiveness to Taiwanese talents in China. Peter Huang, who jumped from being a leading chip maker in Taiwan to a Beijing company in 2017, said: “I think I can see the future, because if mainland China wants to make its own chips, it will become self-reliant, people like me will have a good chance. “
More opportunities and higher salaries are considered to be key factors in attracting senior engineers from Taiwan to China. A survey by a China headhunter company in 2019 showed that the average annual salary of middle-level managers in the Taiwan chip industry is about NT $ 2 million (about RMB 440,000), while the average annual salary in mainland companies is as high as NT $ 4.5 million (about RMB 1 million).
https://en.liexianda.com/index.php?s=/Mobile/Show/index/cid/5/id/16.html The higher salary is paid by the Chinese Communist State, see below: