Student entrepreneurs a rarity
(China Daily)
Updated: 2005-04-09 09:32

With Chinese universities turning out as many as 3 million new graduates a year, the nation is quickly discovering the need to equip its young people not with just knowledge but the courage to build their own enterprises.

Gone are the days when a university diploma would qualify a person for being a member of the elite class. Only by adding entrepreneurial knowledge to the menu of skills for those newly launched into the workplace can today's young people prove to be society's most highly valued human resources.

Owning and running a company is an incredible way to learn how to use one's knowledge, manage human relationships, and serve other people.

It is welcome that some government agencies have announced improved terms of financial support to university students' business ventures.

The Ministry of Labour and Social Security announced on March 29 that it would initiate a training programme designed for 300,000 people across the country in 2005, including college students, laid-off workers and migrant labourers, with the expectation that half of the trainees will start their own businesses. The ministry hopes that such start-ups will become a new source of jobs to help ease China's lingering unemployment crisis.

On the local level, Shanghai, the largest business city of the nation, pledged on March 22 that the municipal government would arrange special funds and grants for university students-turned entrepreneurs. The financial help altogether could amount to as much as 150 million yuan (US$ 18.1 million) in three years.

There are also calls from government-related think-tanks for lower taxes and easier administrative processes for university students' start-ups.

More local governments are reportedly working on similar policies although there are also people who argued that fresh university graduates usually do not have needed managerial experience, and that their start-ups tend to fail more quickly.

But the key, as local officials say in their defence, is not just that the university graduates' start-ups can help society create jobs, they can benefit the overall business environment. They represent a different learning experience for the university graduates themselves, to help toughen themselves into the nation's future leaders of business development.

No matter how long they last in their business endeavours, so long as they are serious, having a certain number of them is better than having every graduate waiting around for the government to hand out job assignments. The government no longer has the financial resources to do so, as it did in the time of the planned economy.

One of the early birds who had enough guts to go a different way from the rest of his class was Wang Yiran. As he graduated last year, while others were making copies of their resumes, buying new suits for interviews, and spending sleepless nights waiting for their employment contracts, the 23-year old young man was busy hiring workers for his partnership company. He is now a specialist in the paper industry, printing and exhibition services.

Wang, a 2004 graduate from Beijing Foreign Studies University, has always dreamed of setting up a company of his own since childhood. He did not belong to the first generation of university graduate-turned entrepreneurs. But he was certainly one of the most courageous around after the 1999-2000 IT bubble burst.

In fact, as the Chinese media reported, there seemed to be a decline in enthusiasm to launch business start-ups among the university students. Nowadays, more often than not, they are advised to take a more rational, if not more conservative, approaches in building their careers.

According to some recent figures from East China's Jiangsu Province, only 56 out of last year's 240,000 graduates chose to start their own businesses.

That figure is discouraging. And for those concerned with the nation's future development potential, it is embarrassing. For Jiangsu is one of the provinces on the Yangtze River Delta, and boasts one of China's largest clusters of private enterprises. But Jiangsu's university campuses do not seem to reflect the rising creativity in society.

One of the top provincial leaders, Li Yuanchao, even recently went to Nanjing University, the best university in Jiangsu, to deliver a speech encouraging students to become self-reliant in their quest for future success.

Jiangsu is hardly unique. Nor is there a sign of change for 2005. In late 2004, a survey of 2,659 university students from Guangdong, another more industrialized province in China, showed only 2.6 per cent of them had start-up plans. While 80.9 per cent reportedly preferred "grabbing a job first, moving to a better job second, and starting one's own company only in the last."

Many of the surveyed complained about a lack of financial resources. Some even complained about a lack of government help.

But obviously few of them had thought what a premium they could gain if only they really managed to put what they thought into reality.

In contrast, Wang, the self-made young entrepreneur, summarized his feeling of pride like this: "Working for somebody else's company is like a kindergarten teacher - you are busy looking after other people's kids. But working from a company of your own, you feel like a real mother, being able to give birth to and nurture your own child. When I was handing pay checks to my employees, I could always feel the worthiness in my four-hour-a-day sleep and constant fear of failure."

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