Improving talent flow brings more than just people
Since the founding of the People’s Republic of China in 1949 and especially since the reform and opening up, remarkable progress has been made in China’s industrialization and urbanization. The permanent urbanization rate increased from 17.92% in 1978 to 59.58% in 2018, and the total volume of retail sales of social consumer goods increased from 155.86 billion yuan in 1978 to 38.1 trillion yuan in 2018, which is largely due to the dividend from population flow. In the new era, population flow, especially talent flow, is playing an increasingly prominent role in promoting economic and social development.The flow of population, especially the flow of talent, is often accompanied by the flow of technology, capital, information and other elements, which provides an abundant and vigorous impetus for development. Within a certain time period, the labor resources for urban development become insufficient, and talent resources become even more scarce. Therefore, acquiring access to more talent, especially high-end talent, has been regarded as key to urban development. Presently, the main indicators for evaluating a city’s development potential are not only the hard infrastructure such as ports, airports, shopping malls and subways, but also whether the city can take a leading role in the competition for talent.
The CPC Central Committee with comrade Xi Jinping as the core, who attaches great importance to the development of talent, is committed to the strategy of reinvigorating China through talent. Therefore, local governments have paid great attention to the cultivation, introduction and employment of talent. Some cities have made real efforts to absorb various types of talent resources and to generate dividends through talent flow.
Ultimately, the competition of comprehensive national strength is about the competition of talent. In order to constantly improve the competitiveness of talent and enhance the comprehensive national strength through cultivating and attracting more excellent talent, we need to keep generating dividends from population flow. In particular, we need to promote the flow of highly talented people who possess a variety of knowledge, skills and social resources. High-level talent flow refers to not only migration in geographical space, but also the flow of various resource elements. That means the flow of talent between regions and cities is not only the flow and competition of the quantity of talent, but also the flow and competition of knowledge, capital, information and other resources.
Most talented people possess certain professional knowledge and skills. With the rapid development of big data and cloud computing, some local governments have formulated a variety of preferential policies to attract scarce talent in this field. With the booming of the 5G industry, large enterprises at home and abroad are offering favorable conditions to attract various types of 5G technical talent, striving to occupy a favorable position in the market competition by improving the competitiveness of their talent pools.
The flow of talent is accompanied by the flow of social relations and material resources. Talented people are not isolated individuals. They may be the marketing manager of a small or medium-sized enterprise, the account manager of a large enterprise, or an ambitious young person with professional knowledge and skills who has started his or her own business.
Individuals often hold certain market and customer resources, and the flow of these social relations and material resources is also an important dividend brought by the flow of talent. Since the 18th National Congress of the CPC, many county-level and township-level governments have introduced attractive preferential policies to attract a large number of young talented people to start businesses in rural areas, effectively promoting rural development and the bidirectional flow of goods and factors of production between urban and rural areas.
The flow of talent may be accompanied by the flow of projects, funds and other elements. Some talented people may introduce projects with great market potential or a considerable amount of commercial investment or venture capital loans. In recent years, some places have focused on the economic and social value brought about by the flow of talent, aiming to attract talent to drive local economic development. At the same time, some places are exploring a new way to stimulate economic development by attracting more talent through eco-environmental improvement as well as local economic and social development.
This article was edited and translated from People’s Daily. Zhang Jijiao is a research fellow from the Institute of Ethnology and Anthropology at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences.
edited by CHEN ALONG
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