China’s Semiconductor Ambitions Fuel European Brain Drain
More than 30,000 workers at European technology companies have moved to China in the last 20 years, bringing critical industry know-how back home.
By
Jordan Robertson
July 19, 2023 at 12:00 PM EDT
Jin Xing’s early career looked like a textbook case of
brain drain, the kind where highly-qualified workers in the developing world seek greener pastures in advanced economies.
In 1996, he moved from China to Europe to do postdoc research in Belgium, and later became chief engineer for the automotive electronics division of the Dutch firm NXP Semiconductors NV, a job he held for more than a decade.
Then Jin flipped the script. In 2010, he moved back to China and founded
Autorock, which makes LCD screens for electric vehicles – and competes with Jin’s former employer.
Jin was one of the more than 30,000 experts that large European technology companies – mostly semiconductor and telecom equipment makers – lost over the past two decades to Chinese organizations, according to a
new study.
Utah-based security firm Strider Technologies Inc. mined open-source data, including scientific journals, patent filings and other public records in China to measure the previously unquantified migration. The company’s findings stoke further fears over China’s technology ambitions, especially in semiconductors, an area where the US and its allies have
ratcheted up export bans on key chips and manufacturing technologies over the past year.
The Chinese Foreign Ministry rejected Strider’s conclusions. “This American company has previously published a series of reports full of false information smearing and attacking China,” it said in a statement. “China's exchange of talent with foreign countries is no different from other countries.”
US officials have
warned for years that China incentivizes intellectual property theft with a vast system of cash grants, tax breaks and other perks designed to induce Chinese nationals living abroad to bring back expertise and trade secrets.
Strider’s Chief Executive Officer Greg Levesque said China “sees leadership in the semiconductor sector as vital to its military and commercial goals and nothing will deter it from pursuing those efforts. Legal and trade barriers in the US will only push them to ramp up operations elsewhere.”
Attempts to reach Jin, whose career was highlighted in the report and who has appeared
repeatedly in Chinese media, were unsuccessful. Strider says that it has no evidence that Jin stole IP. NXP didn’t return a message seeking comment.
The European companies that have lost the most employees to Chinese firms include Nokia Oyj, Ericsson AB, Siemens AG, Robert Bosch GmbH and NXP, the report found. Those companies combined employ about 950,000 people. Huawei Technologies Co., ZTE Corp., Lenovo Group Ltd. and Wingtech Technology Co.’s Nexperia were among the beneficiaries.
The workers’ motivations “span the gamut – some couldn’t cut it so they went back to China, others were well compensated to make the move, while others respond to a sense of patriotism,” Levesque said.
Petri Kuivala, a security adviser at Hoxhunt Oy and former executive at Nokia and NXP, said the report highlights the scale of Chinese recruitment of Western tech workers. “They carry a huge amount of knowledge and information with them to the ‘mothership,’” he said. “I doubt the magnitude has been understood very well by industry leaders.”
Last week, the UK parliament’s intelligence and security committee published a
222-page report detailing the growing threat from China – including recruitment of technological talent. “The lack of action to protect our assets from a known threat was a serious failure, and one from which the UK may feel the consequences for years to come,” it said.
Meanwhile, Jin’s Autorock, which counts a state scientific institute and a state-backed fund among its shareholders, found rapid success. At a car show in Shanghai in 2015, seven of the 14 new electric vehicles on display used the company’s technology.
As Autorock’s stature grew, Jin discussed efforts his former European employer took to prevent him from leaving with trade secrets in an
interview he gave to state-owned Science and Technology Daily. But the safeguards, Jin boasted, couldn’t stop him from bringing back “the knowledge and experience in my head.”
