[Ed. note: This post is authored by Evan Jowers and Robert Kinney of Kinney Recruiting, sponsor of the Asia Chronicles. Kinney has made more placements of U.S. associates and partners in Asia than any other firm in the past two years. You can reach them by email: asia at kinneyrecruiting dot com.]
Evan here. Apologies for no new post last week, as Robert and I have been extremely busy and also traveling quite a bit. Our Asia team as a whole, including Alexis Lamb, Yuliya Vinokurova, Robert and me, are representing more qualified US biglaw attorney candidates for Asia than at any other time prior. While some of these even highly qualified candidates will be on a longer term job search involuntarily (due to the market), and others are contacting us with plans to move to Asia in a year or two (over half of our Asia placements have been of US associates that contacted us a year or more before starting a job search), we are seeing a surge in active interviews and hiring in Asia, especially Hong Kong / China, for our most qualified candidates.
Things continue to pick up dramatically in the China economy, as a successful stimilus and increased lending are helping the stock indexes in HK / China surge. The Shanghai Index has now doubled its global recession low in November ’08. The Shanghai Index is the world’s best performing stock market, having gained 89% this year thus far. Earlier this month, China briefly overtook Japan as the world’s second largest stock market by value and is likely to soon overtake Japan indefinitely. Atlhough there will most likely be a correction in the market later this year, with stocks in China being too expenseive, on average trading at 37 times earnings, it is clear that China’s domestic economy is quite strong, on the rebound, and growing rapidly.
I say the domestic economy because there is a perception out there that China’s economy is heavily reliant on exports to the west, but in reality it is becoming more and more of a consumer driven economy. For example, consumers in China now buy more new cars and gold than any other country in the world and not so long ago it would have been unthinkable that the US and India would not be those leaders, repsectively, indefinitely. Some countries, such as Australia for example, have become quite reliant on exports to China rather than vice versa. While of course, the China economy benefits greatly from the US and other Western markets importing goods from China, and there is of course a very substantial manufacturing industry in China that relies on demand from west, there has been some decoupling of China’s economy from the US economy. The global downturn has made this reality more clear and has surprised many economic experts that felt certain that China’s economy would suffer a major and long-term blow from the serious recession in western markets.
***More after the jump.

Continue reading “The Asia Chronicles: China’s Economy Surging / List of Some Urgent Asia Job Openings (July 27, ’09 Post)”