Talent retention was a key issue discussed by the city’s political advisers during a panel discussion of this year’s Shenzhen Municipal Committee of the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference (CPPCC), the Southern Metropolis Daily reported.
Xi Dan, the city’s political adviser as well as senior vice president of China’s tech giant Tencent, said on the panel that young talents have to find a place outside the city’s central districts to live after finishing working at 9 or 10 p.m. because they cannot afford a home near their companies.
“This is a realistic issue. No one can do this for a long span of time,” said Xi, adding that Shenzhen’s attractiveness to young talents has already decreased.
Xi has a deep feeling about this. He said that Tencent has failed in competing with Alibaba, another one of China’s tech giants based in Hangzhou, for talents in the past two years.
Xi offered three reasons: “The first is that Shenzhen doesn’t hold many advantages over Hangzhou. Second, Hangzhou has put forward a series of alluring preferential policies to attract talents. And finally, the disappearance of urban villages near Shenzhen Hi-tech Industrial Park, such as Baishizhou and Dachong village, means the loss of cheaper housing for talents.”
Yang Peng, another of the city’s political advisers, said that more and more talents, from home and abroad, prefer to stay in their own cities.
Yang further explained that many young people born after the 1990s he has met have not visited Shenzhen, and Shenzhen is not their top choice for work.
Yang suggested that these people would consider working in Beijing, Shanghai, Hangzhou, Chengdu, Nanjing, Guangzhou before Shenzhen.
As to the reasons behind this, Yang suggested that the lack of a comprehensive impression of Shenzhen is the main one. Most young people he met remember Shenzhen as a special economic zone with a developed economy and nothing else.
Zhu Changhua, a political adviser, said that people, especial those who are not from cities, are realistic when it comes to housing. “There were only 19,000 talent housing units available last year,” said Zhu.
Luo Wenhua, another adviser, also called for continued control on housing prices. Luo said that over 200 R&D personnel left his company in 2019. The reason, according to Luo, was because they could not afford the housing costs in Shenzhen.
Luo observed that figuring out how the city can retain talents is much more important than how to attract.
“Creating a sound business environment should not be a single policy. How we can make the enterprises and people here want to stay, by allowing them to live happily in the city, is the question we should think about,” said Luo.