For years, China's uber rich gen zs moved seamlessly between the elite societies of the East and West.
So in China people call them four dye, which is second generation rich if you just translate it literally.
Selina Shu was Bloomberg's reporter for investing.
And these scions of the wealthy, these four Dyes, they're educated in the West, they grew up all around the world. They're fluent in multiple languages, and they moved very fluently between communists China and Otho, the intellectual cradle off the West. So when you combine all these factors together, you have a very very small pool of very intelligent, cosmopolitan, open minded young people with extremely abundant resources. So they're kind of like the top one percent of the one percent.
These kids of China's top one percent, the children of casino mobiles, real estate tycoons, and billionaires. They have been playing a prizing role in building goodwill and mutual trust between China and the rest of the world. But lately, something very different is happening with this group of young and rich Chinese. They're leaving jobs and opportunities in the US to come home to China.
A lot of them are choosing to gravitate home, throw their lots in with Beijing, even if it means sometimes they have to navigate revus culture shock or deal with the risk of perhaps sudden crackdowns on the affluent or on sudden sectus in society.
From Bloomberg, I'm wanha and this is the big take today on the show Uber Rich. Young Chinese are returning home and taking their family fortunes with them. Why and how that's affecting US China relations. So when we're talking about the gen zs of China, we're talking about people who are mostly born between the late nineteen nineties and through the early two thousands. It was a time when US China relations were very different. Here's President George W.
Bush in two thousand and six. Is the issue of the future in many ways is China, and I would call our relationship with China very positive and complex.
So those were the heydays of the US China relationship. That was when the world was very open to globalization. There was a lot of trade, a lot of people to people.
Exchanges, Selina says. Because these young people grew up in a time of openness between the two countries, they had a unique opportunity to help strengthen the ties between the US and China. One of the ways they did that was on college campuses in the United States and one school especially stood out.
So an example I think of this is the Hubboit College China Forum. So for years like this forum has kind of brought business mogul experts leaders of their field to Harvard University and kind of brought them from both the US China, rest of the world. And he had all these people mixed together.
And gassing Zeno and shall all that dat.
So some of the past guests included people like Jack Ma also legend from Salemi Blackstone's Stephen Schwartzman Bridgewater as Ray Dalia, so really a kind of very very interesting mix from both countries. They were mostly invited by a very small group of student organizers, some of whom were the children of Chinese billionaires or even government officials. So the moneyed and the powerful between the world's two largest economies, and they were hopped out together every April in person
and a very lively exchange of ideas. So that kind of demonstrated Walf's power to bridge geopolitical rips.
With this April, the stage of the Harvard China Forum looked very.
Different in this year is Hobatt College China Farm. In April twenty twenty three, only a handful of executives from mainland China came in person to the forum in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
Just a few years back, the ballroom at Harvard was packed and it was an annual form that was not to be missed by elite business leaders in the US and China. And as for the wealthy students who historically had helped make this forum possible.
I think a lot of them are also choosing a very different path that they're gravitating home instead of staying in the US.
Yeah, And why is it that that they are going home? I mean, are the tensions so bad that they feel like they have to leave the US?
So Joe, political tensions is one factor. There's also the uncertainty of the global economy. There's increased hostility abroad, increased discrimination to US. A lot of Chinese nationals because of some of the policy decisions that the Chinese government has
made during COVID and after. So if you look at the number of Chinese students in US universities as of January this year, as plummeted nearly thirty percent from twenty twenty, So a lot of these Chinese students just don't want to come to America anymore.
For China's part, the country has its arms wide open to welcome these returnees. They're some of the best and the brightest of this generation that are now just starting their careers, and they're coming back with sought after overseas experience. Even China state media have written about them in glowing reports.
More Chinese students are coming back to China instead of staying in the States.
China's brain drain is getting reversed.
We've also seen a huge talent deficit in China for many of the high tech sectors that they're trying to pursue, including obviously semiconductors, quantum computing, and other very high skilled service sectors. So sea turtles, as what Chinese people call these retorneyes, usually are able to offer some kind of differentiation in scales that include stuff like more hands on experiences and more global outlook our resources and connections to people abroad.
But it's not just about talent returning to help start up businesses in important industries. A lot of these gen zs are also bringing money their family fortunes back into China after the break. How will the returning mega wealthy impact China's economy, We'll hear from one These young and rich Chinese are not just coming home to the mainland, They're taking their money with them, and Selena says this movement of capital flowing back to China could have big impact.
Chinese tycoons, you know, the ones who built some of the world's biggest enterprises. As the nation open up to capitalism, these people are sitting on almost one point one trillion of cumulative wealth that they're as will likely control in the future. So the majority of these people, these gen zs are interested in entrepreneurship in China, are in investing Vibe family offices, sometimes in the Greater Age Pacific region in places like Singapore or Hong Kong, rather than in the West.
These wealthy gen zs, the top one percent of a very exclusive club, are coming home with money and valued skills, and they're bucking a trend at home. Many middle class Chinese are concerned about China's economic future. They fear that President Hijinping's common prosperity policy might take away the wealth they've built. Many are moving with their money to places
like Australia and the United States. So the capital and talent those uber rich gen zs are bringing back into China comes at a critical time for the country.
Yeah. So one example would be Alice Hoe. So she's the youngest daughter of Stanley Ho, the casino Magnet and Macau. So she has a very very cosmopolitan upbringing. She grew up in Hong Kong, she went to boarding school in the UK, she did High University and MIT, and then
later went to Shanghai Universe for the Stutsman Scholarship. So she kind of kind of represents this very uh the epitome kind of of the cosmopolitan not bringing these people have I love to rich cultures, to cultures, region to region and people to people and book.
That's Alice Hoe speaking at a conference in Reat, Saudi Arabia in October.
And she's chosen after graduation to live on the mainline for the first time in her life. So she's based in Beijing right now, and she is the chief youth officer of this climate advocacy group called the Global Alliance of Universities and Climate Allow Me to introduce the Climax campaign where young people will come together. So you can kind of see her flying around all over the world to climate conferences, including COP twenty seven, and she's done
a lot of work in youth at vocacy. You know, she doesn't talk about jee politics at all, so I think for her, climate advocacy is something that rises above geopolitical tensions.
So, Selena, we've now got these young, super rich Chinese coming back to the main life, even before they've started careers in the US. What are the consequences of that?
The world's getting first and foremost more estranged to China, a lot less contact and understanding compared to previous generations. Ironically, even though you know now travel globalization is obviously more advanced. And secondly, I think and a more important impact is that Chinese have a more negative image of America, especially young Chinese, with the notable exception of Chinese students who've actually studied abroad America, so everyone else generally has more
anti American stands. And that's really worrying because on the American side, with few and a few Chinese students studying there and deciding to live there and take their roots there you kind of see a growing lack of understanding, and that's going to be a huge issue for how Chinese society is going to function and what kind of domestic reactions they have to geopolitics globally.
Selena, I like to pull the lens back a little bit. Now, there was a time when interest in China among American students was really high. The Chinese government even funded more than one hundred of these Confucius institutes at US universities to teach Mandarin and Chinese culture, and nearly all of those institutes have now closed. Are we also seeing waning interest of China in the US.
Unfortunately we are. So it's quite concerning because this trend is not just happening, you know, in the US, but also in China. So as a bilateral pattern. Years ago, you could see people in America wanting to learn Chinese. You know, there are a lot of people traveling to China, moving to China, doing a grad trip in China after college. I haven't worked there permanently. So they have helped to bridge the two nations just as much as their Chinese
counterparts have. But now the numbers are really just dwindling.
A decade ago, there were nearly fifteen thousand US students in China. Today there are only three hundred and fifty those numbers from the State Department. It's like a ninety eight percent.
Draw, and that could make it tough to train the next generation of diplomat.
We need to have the next generation of China experts for our entire government, and of course, the declining number of American students in China makes the US something of a black box to many ordinary Chinese too. Exactly, that's it for today's show. This episode was produced by Young Young. Blake Maples is our sound engineer. Caitlin Kenny is our editor. Thanks to Marufo Hossein for production help. Sage Bauman is Bloomberg's head of podcast. Thanks for listening.