Greater Bay Area: tech entrepreneurs call for more policy support to attract talent to the region

Experts call for government officials to draw up better policies to draw the country’s best and brightest to the region

Talent flow between Hong Kong and the mainland leaves much to be desired, said professors, officials and entrepreneurs

Reading Time:3 minutes

The Beijing-Hong Kong-Macau expressway lights up in the Futian district of Shenzhen, one of 11 cities included in the Greater Bay Area project. Photo: Roy Issa

Published: 8:00am, 29 Oct 2021Updated: 3:56pm, 29 Oct 2021

Chinese entrepreneurs in the fields of science and technology are calling for more government action to help push forward the Greater Bay Area’s development, as various challenges, including a talent shortage, remain four years after Beijing first formulated an ambitious blueprint for the region.

That message came from a forum on Thursday at the Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK), where professors, government officials and entrepreneurs discussed the prospects of the Greater Bay Area, an economic bloc in southern China covering Hong Kong, Macau and nine mainland cities including Shenzhen and Guangzhou.

While the central Chinese government has envisioned the region as a national economic and technology centre, attracting more skilled professionals to the proposed megalopolis has proved to be difficult.

“The fundamental bottleneck for the development of artificial intelligence is still [the lack of] talent,” Lin Dahua, a co-founder of artificial intelligence (AI) unicorn SenseTime, told the forum. “There is a big gap between the growth speed of talent supply and the growth speed of the market’s demand for talent.”

To bridge that talent gap, the Greater Bay Area needs to overcome several policy barriers, Lin said. Shenzhen and Hong Kong, for example, can establish joint policies to draw people using their respective advantages, he suggested.

Founded by a group of CUHK professors in 2014, SenseTime develops AI products used in a variety of areas, including autonomous driving, augmented reality, facial recognition and medical imaging. SenseTime, which filed in August to go public in Hong Kong, also supplies its technology to the Chinese government for use in public security and surveillance, an area that contributes about 30 per cent of the company's revenue, according to several Chinese media reports.

Li Ruiyu, co-founder and head of product at Shenzhen-headquartered AI start-up SmartMore, echoed Lin’s comments.

Select Voice

Choose your listening speed

Get through articles 2x faster

1.25x

250 WPM

Slow

Average

Fast

00:0000:00

1.25x