Originally Posted by
West Coast Ace
We can respectfully agree to disagree. I've been going back and forth for the last serveral years. Almost all the young people I talk to would do anything to come to the US and stay. As much as things are improving economically in China, the goverment still interferes in their daily lives - e.g. restricted speech, shutting down access to innocuous Internet sites, etc.
I'm not sure if the discrepancy in opinions is partly because of the word "young". With my experiencing now doing recruiting for an international professional services firm - many "young" people (e.g. undergrads) would prefer to stay in US (I don't know their longer-term intention) and you can very often see their geographic preferences to be US instead of China/HK offices, or at least rank US higher than China/HK; while for the "older" people (e.g. MBAs, PhDs, candidates with family, etc), esp those who have worked in US/Europe for a while, a much much bigger proportion of them would prefer to come back to China (or I'd say way more than half of the Chinese candidates I'm looking at). My guess is that the younger people would prefer to stay in US at least for a few years to try things out first, "to get some international experience", while the relatively "older" ones who are looking for a more long-term career or want to settle down somewhere for a longer time would actually prefer to come back.