title: “Home At Last” ShowToc: true date: “2023-01-06” author: “Marilyn Merrill”
The words were pure Oprah, but they proved prophetic. In a matter of weeks, the youngest man in the room–a 26-year-old former national math champion named Shao Yibo–scribbled down a business proposal, sold his belongings and left for Shanghai, where he launched a Chinese version of the Internet auction giant, eBay. On the way, he stopped off for a day in Silicon Valley and persuaded investors to give him $400,000. Weeks later classmate Tan Haiying returned to Shanghai to visit friends before starting an investment-banking job in New York. She never used her return ticket to the United States: Shao persuaded her to join his firm as chief operating officer. Within a year three other members of the clique–Huan Yiming, Renee Chen and Herbert Wang–also returned to launch start-up companies. And Zhang? She landed a business-development job at Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp. in Beijing. She also works overtime pursuing her Oprah dream. Once a week she hosts a popular talk show on Beijing TV that takes on such daring topics as AIDS, drug abuse and–yes–Internet dating.
The Tiananmen Generation is finally coming home. The 1989 Army crackdown on the democracy movement accelerated an exodus of talent: tens of thousands of students (including a few in the HBS class of ‘99) left China or simply stayed away. Now the trend is reversing. Lured by an increasingly open economy–and government incentives–these prodigal sons and daughters are returning to become driving forces in academia and government, banking and the Internet. Nowhere can the drama–and the inherent dilemmas–of this return be seen more clearly than in the group of Chinese friends in the Harvard Business School class of 1999. Of the 12 mainland classmates (one didn’t make it that May evening), six have returned to China, while the other six have, in some cases reluctantly, remained abroad. Ten years after the tumult in Tiananmen Square, these newly minted M.B.A.s are again torn by feelings of family, culture, ambition and patriotism. Neither choice is easy. Those who remain abroad have fine jobs, but they live in a foreign land–and often look longingly at their pioneering classmates back home. But going back is a gamble. It is filled with hardships, headaches and the vague hope that they can help shape China’s future. And perhaps make a bundle in the process.
China has a history of pushing away its best and brightest, especially during the past 50 years of communist rule. Those who, out of patriotism, came back from the West shortly after the revolution often suffered the worst persecution. From the Hundred Flowers campaign of the 1950s to the Cultural Revolution of the late 1960s and early 1970s, millions of intellectuals were banned, punished or killed. In the late 1970s, Beijing allowed students to study overseas in the hopes that they would return to modernize the country. More than 320,000 students have gone abroad to study since then–nearly half to the United States. Only 110,000 have returned, and the flow virtually stopped after soldiers gunned down hundreds, if not thousands, of pro-democracy protesters in 1989.
But the tide is turning. Over the past four years there has been a steady 13 percent annual increase in returnees, according to official Chinese statistics. In 1998, the last year for which figures are available, 7,379 students came back–up from 1,593 in 1990. Why? It’s not simply that the government is dangling carrots rather than brandishing sticks (box). Part of it may also be bureaucratic timing: under a special U.S. law, some 50,000 students who had left China soon after the 1989 crackdown became eligible for citizenship in 1998, giving them the ability to travel freely. But the biggest factor is the phenomenal growth–and openness–of China’s economy.
For some members of HBS'99, the journey began with the events in Tiananmen Square. None of them is eager to talk about the protests and their aftermath, but the tragedy has shaped and shadowed their lives. Ivy Li, then a third-year engineering student at Beijing’s Qinghua University, was so distraught that she decided to pursue her master’s degree at the State University of New York in Buffalo. “I had doubts about where the country was heading,” says Li, who left in 1991. For Huan Yiming, a second-year university student in Shanghai at the time, the tragedy accelerated her decision to leave for college in Michigan. Like several of her HBS classmates, Huan went on to graduate school in engineering–in part to keep her immigration status, in part because the job opportunities back home were limited. After graduate school, she worked for four years in a General Motors plant in Michigan–as the only Chinese on the factory floor.
By the time the Chinese students converged on HBS, they were not looking for an escape, but an edge for their eventual return to China. After years of working for consulting firms, multinationals or start-ups, all of them felt the need to deepen their understanding of Western business culture. At HBS, the Chinese students quickly gravitated together. The old hands helped the newcomers learn how to drive, shop for food, ride the subway. Three of them shared a flat, and because they cooked Chinese food, it soon became a hangout. The group vacationed together, snorkeling in Puerto Rico, skiing in Vermont, relaxing on Cape Cod. They bonded so well that they even wrote a book, in Chinese, about their HBS experience.
But the dilemma about the future always loomed large. When Chinese Prime Minister Zhu Rongji spoke at nearby Massachusetts Institute of Technology in April 1999, shortly after graduation, he invited business-school graduates to return home, stressing that China’s greatest need was management expertise. “We were all struggling with the choices,” says Eric Xin, a 30-year-old management consultant who has decided, for the moment, to stay and work for McKinsey & Co. “We have deep roots in China, but we’re also flying high in the Western world.” Now with a 1-year-old son and another on the way–“I can have more than one child here,” Xin says, only half-joking–Xin and his lawyer wife plan to stay in Washington a few more years, gaining experience abroad before going back to China. “I want to test myself to see if I can survive in a pure American environment,” he says. Still, he admits, “sometimes I stop in the street and wonder, “What am I doing here?”
For some of the Harvard grads, China is still too underdeveloped, especially in the financial sector, to lure them back. “There’s a lot of thunder, but not much rain,” says Peter Chen, a debt specialist with GE Capital in Tokyo. But for others, it is simply that family comes first. Huang Jingsheng, who at 43 is the oldest of the group, is worried about subjecting his wife and two young boys to Beijing’s pollution. For the time being, Huang is living in clear-aired Sacramento, California, where he works as a venture capitalist for Intel Capital, handling occasional China deals. “There are different ways of helping China,” he says. “My classmates have found one way. I’m still figuring out how to do the same thing–and making the right choice for my family.”
The Class of ‘99 grads are a new breed of returnee. Except for Zhang, they are not working for law firms or multinationals, but building their own companies. And that makes their impact on China even greater. It’s not just the millions of dollars in foreign capital they are bringing in. (Shao and Tan have raised more than $25 million for their online auction house, Eachnet.) They are shaping a whole new industry. After graduation, Herbert Wang worked for six months at Nortel in Toronto, but he quickly returned to Beijing to found Prient, a start-up that helps old-line companies go online. “I felt that I could add more value to my country by running my own company,” he says. “I couldn’t do that in the U.S.”
The returnees are not just generating wealth but a whole new set of values. Some of it is just a matter of style. Slurping down noodles at a local Shanghai restaurant, Shao seems slightly out of place in his pressed khaki pants, striped Ralph Lauren Polo shirt and moussed hair–as if he were a visitor from Silicon Valley. In Beijing, Zhang wears stylish outfits to her job at the News Corp. headquarters, occasionally grabbing a hazelnut coffee at Starbucks or working out at the modern health club across the street. But it goes deeper. The returnees are creating companies that embody some of the same values that the Tiananmen-era protesters were demanding in political life: freedom, accountability, ethics and hard work. “We’ve created a working environment that is so different from the typical Chinese one,” says Renee Chen, who is working 100-hour weeks to build her B2B booksite, Chinayou.com., which now has 50 employees. “Everyone’s ideas are respected. And if you can do things better than your boss, great. Show me.”
But returnees are forced to adjust to local practice, too. In China, business is not simply about profits, but relationships. Huan Yiming came back to China earlier this year after working at Sun Microsystems. In Shanghai, where she set up her wireless-applications company, Etonenet, she says she “had to relearn China. I tried to structure this like a Silicon Valley company, but I quickly realized this wasn’t the U.S.” Her employees didn’t know what stock options were, and she didn’t know how to navigate the local bureaucracy. So she hired an old friend to be her local partner.“We have to be modest to learn how local business works,” Huan says.
That cultural understanding is precisely what Zhang is trying to promote on her TV show, “Common Ground.” The program’s slogan: “Building a bridge between China and the world.” Each week the show takes advantage of her experience in the United States to look at sensitive issues from local and foreign perspectives, in English and Mandarin. This month, in a segment on Internet dating, Zhang presided over a marriage proposal between an American man and the Chinese girlfriend he met on the Internet. Oprah, indeed! Back in her office at News Corp., under a poster for her favorite TV show, “Friends,” Zhang fiddles with the Snoopy chain on her cellular phone. “Things are changing so fast here,” she says. “The whole point is to show that people have different values, that not everybody thinks the same about every issue. And that may be new for China.”
Still, change is not always comfortable. Zhang left behind a group of close friends in the United States and returned to a world that was virtually foreign to her. She has few friends in Beijing, and she still feels a need to tread lightly on the set. “The producers are taking a real risk to have me host the show,” she says. “I’ve gotten a lot of my values from abroad, and the show has no script.” When she chose to do her first program on AIDs, the producers seemed more concerned about her young, casual appearance than the delicate subject matter. They dressed her up in a prim gray suit. “I told them: ‘Please let me be me!’ " says Zhang. “Now they realize that the host needs to have his or her own personality.”
It’s been more than a year since the Chinese members of the class of ‘99 gathered for their soul-searching discussion over beer and potato chips. Today they are too busy–and live too far apart–to get together much. In August the U.S. contingent will have a mini-reunion at Zhang’s wedding, which is being held in Los Angeles because “more of our friends are there,” she says. When Zhang and Peter Chen visited Shanghai a few months ago, they managed to meet Shao, Tan and Huan for a cup of coffee. But the group couldn’t meet until after midnight. And even then, they were just taking a break from the hardest–and most exhilarating–work of their lives.
