I got really worried while reading the news that a bunch of big-name government offices and business corporations are ready to recruit from the financial executives who have been made redundant on the Wall Street.
It would be a mistake to offer many of them jobs in China. It would be a bigger mistake to offer them cushy government jobs funded by Chinese taxpayers.
The China Securities Regulatory Commission (CSRC) was recently reported to have interviewed some 150 executives from the New York-based financial companies before the recruiters went to Chicago.
Not just CSRC, according to a China Daily report, but nearly all other Chinese financial regulatory bodies and the central bank have had talent hunting plans abroad.
The official press has never reported how much they would get paid once they come to work in China. But judging by how the global financial service industry pays their expatriate executives in China, everyone would get a fantastic package including a suburban villa with cars and maids, all paid by the company.
Or if it is said that the jobs are Chinese jobs and cannot be as fat as those, a large State-sector or private sector corporation can still pay its senior executives from 600,000 to 700,000 yuan a year, or around $100,000.
My point is, however, those people are likely to be the wrong kind of talent. Despite their academic background, in hindsight, their alleged expertise has hardly been put to a good use for their companies. Working under their employers' immense fallacies, their mathematical models, their thinking power, their talking skills, and their long hours of hard work have been wasted and resulted in massive losses for society.
There is no point in transplanting them in China with the ideas and practices that should never be allowed to be repeated anywhere in the world. It would be like collecting some cast-off machines from an industrial stage that is already passed but still paying them according to their book value of a long time ago.
Those people are useful only if they can prove they have better skills yet to be utilized. Or at least, if they are critical of the system in which they worked and enjoyed high salaries - just like what the management scholar Peter Drucker once did, and have walked away from their financial jobs and become devoted to something of a more concrete help to society.
For technical reasons, China may need only a few of them, hired on a consulting basis, to help its financial regulators and executives gain a better understanding of the details of the current crisis.
People in developing countries tend to be obsessed with the seemingly advanced role models in the developed world, including the Wall Street. But as some Western economists and financial experts have pointed out, the financial services industry has for some time now deviated from its original purpose of existence.
The industry can no longer help society allocate wealth and manage risk, while many banks do not want to be responsible for owning their loans, but are only interested in re-packaging their loans before selling them to other people. What is the use, then, for China to even try to collect the former staff from such business practices now that their old rules of game have become obsolete?
The government could well have used its Wall Street recruitment budget for inviting more critics of the Western financial services industry to give lectures in China.
One of the criticisms for Western financial services industry is that it has forgotten the skills to help small companies, while the majority of the companies in the world, East or West, remain small ones.
What the Chinese government really should do, as I would strongly recommend, is hire people from places where the financing for small companies and community development are most effective. They are the right kind of experts that China both needs and can afford.
So, stop chasing the Wall Street.
E-mail: younuo@chinadaily.com.cn
(China Daily 02/02/2009 page4)
