Job barrier dissolves for old combatants
The frequent exchange of hostile rhetoric over the past year has driven Beijing and Taipei further apart than ever. But barely noticed under the political deadlock, the boundaries between China and Taiwan have almost completely vanished in one particular area: the recruitment of executives to feed China's economic boom.
As China became the fastest-growing market for most multinationals, these companies have reached out all over Asia in search of Mandarin-speaking professionals for their quickly expanding business in the country. Human resources experts point out that Taiwanese managers form an increasingly important part of this “Greater China talent pool”.
“ Hong Kong's human resources talent pool was the first to begin integration with the People's Republic of China in the mid-1980s, with Hong Kong Chinese moving into executive roles in the PRC,” SES Asia, the executive search firm, said in a recent research note. “However, Taiwan's integration with the PRC from a human resources point of view is now also quite extensive, despite the political and bureaucratic barriers between Taiwan and the PRC.”
The mainstream of the flow of Taiwanese executives to China is formed by the island's own companies. With accumulated direct investment reaching $100bn according to private estimates, they are one of the largest foreign investors in China. But professionals from the island also play an increasingly important role for multinationals.
“ We come across many prejudices regarding Taiwanese executives due to the political deadlock across the Strait,” says Julian Buckeridge, an SES director in Taipei. “But a Taiwanese can be just as happy working in Beijing as in Taipei.”
Taiwanese have long been the most competitive group within the Greater China talent pool for jobs in the electronics industry because of the dominant role of the island's companies in contract chipmaking and IT hardware. But over the past few years, they have also started to make inroads into other sectors in China.
“ Marketing services and financial services used to be very Hong Kong-centric in terms of recruitment,” says Mr Buckeridge. “But we see an increasing impact of Taiwanese in these sectors in Northern and central China.”
TB Song, a Taiwanese, chairs the Greater China operations at Ogilvy & Mather in Beijing and Shanghai. J. Walter Thompson, North America's largest advertising agency, has chosen Hsueh Cheng-tien, a Taiwanese, as creative director in Beijing. In the financial sector, Citibank and HSBC are using talent they groomed in their long-standing presence on the island for their expansion in China.
Compared with language and cultural barriers managers from Hong Kong faced when they started working in China, there is much less dividing Taiwanese professionals from their Chinese environment in mainland cities such as Beijing or Shanghai.
In contrast to Hong Kong before its handover to China in 1997, Taiwan has had Mandarin as its official language for almost six decades. The administrative and business culture on the island, developed under 50 years of rule by the Kuomintang, which came from the mainland, also bears much more resemblance to China than the one in pre-handover British-ruled Hong Kong.
While these competitive differences are becoming less pronounced with Hong Kong under Chinese rule and the special administrative zone's quick adoption of Mandarin, the growing role of Taiwanese talent in China is now mainly driven by the fact that Taiwan has a larger absolute number of managers available than Hong Kong.
Because of China's continuously growing economic importance, many Taiwanese executives in foreign companies sooner or later face the decision whether or not to go to China.
“ If they want to develop their career, they have to go to the mainland because if they stay behind, their influence and promotion chances will drop,” says Louis Yen, managing director at Mercer Taiwan. “Many multinationals' presence in Taiwan is shrinking while their presence in China is expanding.”
But while, as Mr Buckeridge puts it, going to China is often viewed as “the all-encompassing cure for career problems”, Taiwanese managers are expected to face new competition in the future from the mainland's own new breed of managers.
Younger emerging Chinese executives in their 30s to early 40s will, over the next decade, become increasingly competitive for positions currently filled by Mandarin-speaking functional heads such as sales, marketing and finance directors from Taiwan, Hong Kong and Singapore currently employed on the mainland, predicts SES.
Among themselves, Taiwanese managers are already competing fiercely for good jobs in China. “Executive compensation packages for mainland jobs used to include an extra 20 to 30 per cent pay as a kind of hardship allowance, but this is shrinking rapidly,” says Charles Wang, managing director at Watson Wyatt in Taipei.
He adds that larger Taiwanese companies mostly source executives for their China business from within their organisations and that being sent to China is viewed at these companies as improving managers' chances for promotion on their return.
Multinationals price their compensation packages largely according to the market, but this does not guarantee much higher pay for a job on the mainland. Even so, “there is no shortage of good people willing to go to China”, says Mr Wang.
For those who take the step, success is not guaranteed. While Taiwanese managers can greatly enhance their career chances by moving to China, they also face greater competition. They are running against a few hundred peers in their home market but find themselves as one of many thousand for all of Greater China.
Within this talent pool, SES observes a clear stratification emerging. While the most proficient third-territory Chinese executives get the chance to broaden their responsibilities beyond China and rise within a multinational company, large numbers of others face the pressure of either localising their compensation packages or returning home.
“ Many, many Taiwanese go to China and are only treading water,” says Mr Buckeridge. Up to 600,000 of the 1m or so Taiwanese living on the mainland do not speak English and swiftly lose their competitive edge over local Chinese, he adds.
In general, western expatriates in China lead the pay charts, followed by Singaporeans and Hong Kong Chinese. Taiwanese are placed between this group and mainland Chinese. But with the increasing integration of human resources in Greater China, experts expect these traditional patterns gr 台湾高管向大陆迁移
在过去的一年中，北京与台北之间频繁的唇枪舌剑使两岸间的距离日渐加大。但在这种政治僵局下，几乎没人注意到海峡两岸的分界线在一个特殊的领域内差不多完全消失了，即为满足中国经济繁荣的需要，招聘高级管理人才。
对大多数跨国公司而言，中国已成为发展最快的一个市场，因此这些公司在整个亚洲范围内网罗会说普通话的专业人士，与企业在中国的飞速发展同步。人力资源专家指出，台湾的管理人员成为这个“大中国区人才库”中日益重要的组成部分。
“ 80 年代中期，香港人进入了中国公司的高级管理层，于是开辟了香港和大陆人力资源一体化的道路，”管理研究公司 SES Asia 在近期的一份调查报告中称，“但从人力资源的角度来看，尽管两岸在政治、官僚制度方面障碍重重，但目前台湾与中国的一体化道路还是相当广泛的。”
流入中国的台湾高级管理人才主要来自台湾的企业。据非官方估计，台湾累计对中国直接投资达 1000 亿美元，成为在中国最大的境外投资者之一。但是，来自台湾的专业人士也对跨国公司发挥着日益重要的作用。
“由于海峡两岸在政治上陷入僵局，我们碰到对台湾管理人员的诸多偏见，”来自 SES 的总监朱利安?贝克里奇 (Julian Buckeridge) 在台北表示，“但是，台湾人可以在北京愉快地工作，就像在台北一样。”
长久以来，台湾人在电子工业方面的就业竞争力在大中国区人才库内首屈一指，这是因为台湾公司在合同芯片制造和信息技术 (IT) 硬件领域的地位举足轻重。但在过去的几年中，他们也开始进入中国的其它行业。
“香港曾在市场服务、金融服务的招聘中独领风骚，” 贝克里奇先生说，“但我们发现，在华北、华中地区，台湾人在这些行业中的影响力正与日俱增。”
例如，来自台湾的宋秩铭坐阵北京和上海，担任奥美 (Ogilvy&Mather) 大中国区主席；北美最大的广告公司智威汤逊 (J.Walter Thompson) 选中台湾人 Hsueh Cheng-tien 出任北京创意总监。在金融界，花旗银行 (Citibank) 和汇丰银行 (HSBC) 也起用了他们在台湾长期培养的人才，满足他们在中国拓展的需要。
与初到中国工作的香港管理人员碰到的语言和文化障碍相比，来自相同中国文化背景的台湾人在北京或上海等大陆城市工作时碰到的难题则少得多了。
台湾将国语作为官方语言已近 60 年，这与 1997 年回归前的香港形成鲜明对比。台湾的行政和商业文化是在来自大陆的国民党 50 年的统治下发展起来的，因此与回归前由英国统治的香港相比，台湾与中国间的相似之处更多。
尽管随着中国恢复对香港特别行政区的主权、香港迅速推广普通话，台湾与香港之间的竞争差异变得不那么显著，但台湾人才仍然在中国扮演着越来越重要的角色，这主要是因为台湾现有的管理人员的绝对人数多于香港。
由于中国在经济上的重要性日益突显，许多外企中的台湾管理人员迟早要做出是否去中国的决定。
“如果他们想发展事业，就必须去大陆，因为如果留在台湾不走，他们的影响力和升职的机会将会减少，”台湾美世 (Mercer) 的总经理 Louis Yen 说，“许多跨国公司在台湾的影响力正在减弱，而在中国的影响力则不断增加。”
但正如贝克里奇先生所言，尽管去中国工作常常被视为“解决一切职业发展问题的灵丹妙药”，但台湾的管理人员今后将遭遇来自大陆的新型管理人才的新的竞争。
中国涌现出一批 30 岁至 40 岁出头较为年轻的管理人才。 SES 预计，在今后的 10 年里，他们对于销售、市场和财务总监等职能性领导岗位的竞争力将越来越强。目前，大陆雇佣会说普通话的台湾人、香港人和新加坡人填补这类空缺。
台湾的管理人员之间早已为争取中国好的工作机会而弄得头破血流。“去大陆工作的管理人员的福利待遇曾包括一类额外艰苦补助，占工资的 20% 到 30% ，但现在这部分津贴正迅速缩水，” 咨询公司华信惠悦 (Watson Wyatt) 的总经理 Charles Wang 在台北说。
他补充道，较大的台湾公司主要从机构内部挑选管理人员负责其中国业务。在这些公司中，去中国工作被看作是增加返台后升职的机会。
跨国公司的福利待遇主要由市场决定，但这并不保证大陆的工资一定会高出许多。即便如此，“仍不乏愿意去中国工作的优秀人才，”王先生说。
跨出这一步的人并不一定都能成功。尽管台湾管理人员能通过去中国工作大大增加其职业发展机会，但他们所面临的竞争也更为激烈。在台湾市场，他们面对的是几百名同等条件的竞争者；但在整个大中国区，他们只是几千分之一。
在这个人才库里， SES 注意到一个明显的分层现象。虽然大多数资深的中方管理人员有机会扩大在中国以外区域的职责范围，并能在跨国公司内部获得升迁机会，但许多其他人面临着福利待遇本地化或打道回府的压力。
贝克里奇先生说，“许许多多的台湾人去中国发展，结果却一无所获。”在常住大陆的 100 多万台湾人中，有 60 万人不会说英语，他们相对本地人的竞争优势很快就会丧失，他补充说。
一般来说，来自西方的外籍人士在收入排行榜上名列第一，新加坡人和香港人则紧随其后。台湾人的收入处于他们和大陆人之间。但随着大中国区人力资源一体化的日益深入，专家们预计，今后这些传统模式将逐渐消失。
