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China Chip Industry Uses High Pay and Benefits to Lure Taiwan Engineers

Deutsche Welle reported that the mainland chip industry uses high payments for labor and benefits to entice Taiwan engineers to work in the mainland. The engineers are promised double their current wages, eight free trips a year to visit Taiwan, subsidized tuition for their children to attend school, and a 40 percent housing allowance. Some engineers said that the amount of money they can make in the mainland would take ten years to make in Taiwan and that such an offer is hard to resist. A Taiwan recruiting firm estimated that, so far in 2018, over 300 senior Taiwan engineers accepted job offers from mainland chip manufacturers. Since 2014, after Beijing set up US$22 billion in funding for the chip industry, close to one thousand engineers from Taiwan have gone to work in the mainland. The number has increased as the U.S. China trade war escalated this year. Data that a research firm released projected that, by the end of 2017, China will have 400,000 professionals in the integrated circuit (IC) industry, which is still far short of the goal of 720,000 by the end of 2020. The mainland prefers engineers from Taiwan over Japan and Korea because there is no language barrier.

Source: Deutsche Welle, September 9, 2018
https://p.dw.com/p/34K09