Hangzhou launches community for youth talent

The Hangzhou Global Youth Talent Community was officially launched at the city’s ITC Zone on March 27, with the synchronous starting of four overseas branches in Sydney, London, Toronto and Seattle.

The center will provide comprehensive services for global youth talent, including returnees landing, releasing internship opportunities, career tutoring, start-up financing, talent evaluation, employment and entrepreneurship platform building, among others.

Take the one-stop returnees landing service for example. The international talent service center on the first floor of the ITC Zone will offer 59 government services and 70 third-party services. Among them are high-level talent evaluation, tax registration, talent residence permit application and the set-up, modification and logout of market entities.

The financing service will provide qualified youth talent with a maximum low-interest credit loan worth 500,000 yuan (US$76,100) and other start-up initiation funds.

“We’ve set up a youth talent media center, digital talent information database, youth entrepreneur incubator and employment platform to multilaterally ensure innovation and entrepreneurship of youth talent in Hangzhou. The services are intended to allow the talent to have a sense of belonging and feel at home in the city,” said an official with the Hangzhou Committee of the Communist Youth League.

At the launch ceremony, details of the Innovation and Entrepreneurship Competition for International Talent 2021 Hangzhou were released, together with the 2021 Hangzhou Entrepreneurship and Innovation Map and the Hangzhou Youth Talent Future Star Financing Plan.

As a city always encouraging innovation, Hangzhou has been improving its services for youth talent over the past several years. For example, it has issued 37 guidelines to improve the ecology of youth talent in the city in 2019 and a three-year policy offering supports to college entrepreneurs in 2020.

In 2019, the population increase in Hangzhou reached 554,000, surpassing Shenzhen in south China’s Guangdong Province for the first time and ranking the first nationwide.

In 2020, the city introduced 436,000 people under the age of 35 with college diplomas into its workforce, up 106 percent year on year.

In the past three years, Hangzhou has maintained its No. 1 position in China in terms of the overall inflow rate of talent and the inflow rate of talent in the Internet industry.

The city has been selected as one of China’s top 10 most attractive cities in the eyes of expats in the past 10 years.