At the Shenzhen International Convention Center in Guangdong province, China, on the 5th, students of various skin colors and dress filled the venue from early morning. The site hosted the awards ceremony for the 10th Huawei ICT (Information and Communication Technology) Competition, held over the preceding three days. Students wearing matching uniforms and holding their national flags sat in the audience with excited expressions, beaming with laughter. One team from Italy, though it did not make it to the podium, approached this reporter to ask for a commemorative photo, saying they wanted to preserve the memory of the day.
Each time a winning team was called, applause and cheers erupted as if an Olympic gold medalist had been born. Among them, the team that drew the most spotlight was the Kenyan team, which won the grand prize in the cloud category. According to local media, the Kenyan team's grand prize win was the first in the 10 years since the competition began. Before boarding their flight to China, they were treated as national heroes, even receiving a commendation from Kenya's Minister of Information and Communications.
The Huawei ICT Competition, held from the 3rd to the 6th, has firmly established itself as a festival for global ICT talent. This year's competition, the 10th, drew participation from more than 220,000 students and teachers from over 100 countries and regions and more than 2,000 higher education institutions. After preliminary rounds, 177 teams from 49 countries and regions advanced to the finals, and 18 teams from eight countries — including China, Nigeria, Singapore, Algeria, Brazil, Egypt, Kenya and the Dominican Republic — won grand prizes. Participants competed with ideas in various fields such as artificial intelligence (AI), computing and cloud.
Placing in the competition leads to a smooth career path. Going on to a research lab at a prestigious Chinese university is common. This is because China's Ministry of Education has officially certified the competition as a university student contest, allowing participants to earn additional points when applying to graduate school. A team from Central China Normal University that won a third-place award last year went on to renowned Chinese graduate programs including the Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing Normal University and Fudan University. Many also join Huawei. Mohammed Alkhoufi, a student from Bahrain who placed first in last year's finals, recently obtained a full-time position as an internet protocol (IP) engineer at Huawei after graduation.
What particularly stood out at the competition was the advance of talent from the "Global South" — developing countries in the Southern Hemisphere — including Africa, Latin America and Southeast Asia. This is because Huawei is actively drawing in talent from countries friendly to China. In fact, the ICT Competition holds preliminaries by region, including the Middle East and Central Asia, Southern Africa, Asia-Pacific, North Africa, Latin America and Europe. Excluding China (154,000 participants), the Global South was overwhelmingly dominant, in the order of the Middle East and Central Asia (25,000), Southern Africa (12,000) and North Africa (9,000). Europe accounted for only about 1,000, and no preliminaries were held at all for North America.
Observers say Huawei, China's representative ICT company, is rolling out a "Belt and Road" approach to securing talent. Beyond the ICT Competition, Huawei provides "Huawei ICT Academy," a practice-oriented ICT curriculum, to more than 3,000 universities and institutions, producing over 1.3 million trainees. It has also run "Seeds for the Future," which invites university students from around the world to Huawei headquarters to provide ICT education and networking opportunities, for more than 10 years. In South Korea as well, more than 7,000 students have gone through this program over 10 years.
Huawei provides the best environment and rewards to the talent it discovers in various places. A representative example is "Xichun Campus," a research and development (R&D) base in Dongguan whose design Chairman Ren Zhengfei, a graduate of Chongqing University's department of architectural engineering, participated in himself. The site, visited on the 3rd, sprawls across 1.8 million square meters — the size of 250 soccer fields — with 112 buildings inspired by 12 European cities such as Heidelberg, Germany, and Paris, France, lined up in a way that created the illusion of being at a theme park. Some 25,000 researchers are stationed here, conducting various R&D centered on the terminal sector.
Amid its technological hegemony competition with the United States, China is staking its survival on attracting talent, with not only the state but also companies and local governments directly stepping forward. Since October last year, the government has created a K-visa targeting young science and technology talent holding a bachelor's degree or higher in STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) fields. It significantly lowered the threshold for entry into China by allowing individuals to apply directly without an employer's invitation. Shenzhen, home to a cluster of Chinese tech companies including Huawei, Tencent and BYD, has operated the "Peacock Plan," a project to attract high-level overseas talent, since 2011. Through last year, it provided a total of 10 billion yuan to more than 300 startup teams, 12 of which successfully went public. At the same time, China is increasingly strictly blocking the outflow of its own talent abroad, including by imposing exit restrictions on engineers at private companies such as Alibaba and DeepSeek.
