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Josephine Ma

With just a year to go until Beijing’s self-imposed deadline to become an international hub of innovation, just 22,000 foreigners are living and working long term in the Chinese capital.
The estimate, from a report compiled by the Beijing International Talent Exchange Association and released at a forum late last month, is well down on the 37,000 foreigners reportedly working in the city a decade ago.
The report did not give comparisons for previous years, but it said fewer foreigners had taken up long-term jobs in the city in recent years, to the point where they account for just 0.2 per cent of the capital’s workforce and 0.1 per cent of its population.
There has also been a shift in the origins of Beijing’s foreign community since the end of the Covid-19 pandemic.
The report said the percentage of Americans and Europeans had dropped from 16 per cent in 2019 to 12, while Africans now made up 31 per cent of the foreign work force, up from 26 per cent.
The proportion of Russians and residents from eastern Europe is also up, from 11 per cent in 2019 to 16 per cent.
“African professionals are very interested in working in China … those from eastern Europe and Russia are a source of new growth,” the Beijing Labour Employment Newspaper Agency quoted the report as saying. The agency is part of the city’s human resources bureau.


The assessment comes as China is trying to attract professionals from overseas to help move the country up the tech value chain and overcome Western barriers to advanced technology.
In May last year, the central and municipal governments rolled out plans to turn Beijing into a technological innovation hub by 2025. The project is being overseen by President Xi Jinping and involves setting up research centres, sci-tech universities and tech companies.
But, according to the report, only 13 per cent of expatriates were taking up scientific research and engineering posts. About 30 per cent were involved in administrative or teaching jobs. It did not say how the remainder were employed.
Nevertheless, more foreigners working in the capital had advanced academic degrees. In 2023, over 40 per cent of expatriates working in the capital had at least a master’s degree, it said, without offering a comparison.
The report also said 20 per cent of the expatriates working in Beijing met the requirement for tier-A working visas, which are usually given to international personnel recruited by regional governments for higher-paying jobs. That share is 13 percentage points higher than in 2018.


China has very few foreign-born workers – in sharp contrast to places such as Silicon Valley, where about 70 per cent of workers were born outside the United States in 2016.
To attract talent, China launched a permanent residence scheme in 2004, but by 2018 only 12,000 green cards had been issued.
There was also an exodus of expatriates from China during and after the pandemic but there are no official numbers on just how many left and how many came back.
In 2014, the 37,000 foreigners taking up long-term jobs in Beijing were mostly from the United States, Japan, South Korea, Germany and Australia. Most of them worked in IT, education, consultancy, and technological research, the China News Service reported at the time.
They were employed at more than 11,000 companies and institutes, ranging from multinationals, to joint ventures and domestic companies.
Despite the lifting of Covid restrictions and the desire to attract foreign workers, European companies struggle to lure the talent to China, according to a survey this year by the European Union Chamber of Commerce in China.
“One significant trend observed is the decoupling between global headquarters and China operations over the past two years. Forty-one per cent of respondents reported this phenomenon, resulting in numerous challenges,” the chamber said.
Other difficulties included a slowdown in existing operations, and reduced ability to capitalise on new projects or investment plans.
The American Chamber of Commerce in China said another factor was rising concern about the geopolitical tension between China and the US.


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The pandemic is over and the government wants expatriates to work in Beijing but numbers are down on a decade ago


The pandemic is over and the government wants expatriates to work in Beijing but numbers are down on a decade ago.
