While in the 1990’s Chinese students graduating abroad preferred to get a job with large foreign multinationals, their sons and daughters now prefer to work for domestic Chinese tech companies such as Xiaomi. They are convinced that Chinese startups can offer them the same opportunities today as foreign multinationals in the 1990s. The career choices of two different generations of foreign-educated Chinese students reflect a wider trend. Once upon a time, foreign multinationals could cherry-pick top Chinese talent from universities with the promise of large salaries, generous benefits and the chance to work at market-leading companies. Today, China’s cutting-edge technology companies – often referred to as China Tech Corporation (CTC) – are the most sought-after employers among many Chinese students.

This marks another blow for multinational corporations (MNCs) already struggling to do business in China amid restrictions and growing hostility towards them as the U.S.-China trade and tech war gathers pace. New graduates are looking less to get a high salary, but care more about personal improvement and access to the best resources a company can offer to develop new products. Moreover many Chinese today perceive a “bamboo ceiling” in the U.S., where they are more often seen as engineers rather than executives. One Chinese executive who now oversees the technology unit of a listed finance and insurance firm in China said that he used to lead a team of 20 engineers at one of the world’s most valuable tech companies in Silicon Valley. “My job was to keep optimizing the performance of a product. But within three years in China, I was promoted to be Chief Scientist of our entire company, leading a team of 1,000,” he said.

LinkedIn compiled a list of the top 25 most desired employers in China, and about 60% were local Chinese companies, with 13 of them internet firms. Alibaba, Baidu and Bytedance topped the list. Tesla ranked sixth behind its Chinese challenger Nio. Amazon, the only other foreign company on the list, ranked eighth. Li Qiang, Executive Vice President of Zhaopin, one of China’s largest online recruiters, described the rising status of CTC among jobseekers as “the dawning of a new era”. “Nowadays, there is nothing a multinational can offer that a domestic firm cannot, be it a compensation package or the chance to be part of international expansion,” he said. “Jobseekers are not particularly looking for domestic firms or multinational firms. They are after good firms and most of the good firms in China these days happen to be domestic tech firms,” he added, as reported by the South China Morning Post.

A survey by Zhaopin in late 2018 found that 28% of Chinese university students said MNCs were their employer of choice, down from 33.6% in 2017. A recent survey by Universum shows that Apple and Siemens were the only two Western names in the top 10 ideal employers for Chinese students in the engineering sector this year, while there were four foreign firms in the top 10 list in 2017. Huawei Technologies ranked top in the Universum list. Xiaomi ranked second, while Apple ranked seventh. It seems that China’s rising clout in the world is now an attractive factor for jobseekers.