The Post-Expat Era: What APAC's China Problem Is Really About

A few weeks ago I was on a call with a regional CEO who had just flown back from Shanghai. He was trying to decide whether to keep one of his most senior expatriate leaders in market.

The performance was not the issue. The cost was not really the issue. His local client leads had told him, quietly, that her presence in the room was no longer helping them win.

I have had variations of that conversation several times this year.

What peers are actually saying

Senior operators I speak with put the expat departure rate from China advertising at around eighty percent over the last five years. I cannot stand that number up as a verified statistic. But every person I ask, whether on an alumni call or at a Singapore dinner with APAC CEOs, lands in the same zone.

What is interesting is why.

COVID, cost cutting, and geopolitics are the tempting explanation. Those are real. They are also the surface reading.

Underneath, something else is shifting. It is about what clients now want in the room.

The China-for-China reading

Local giants like Huawei, BYD, and Xiaomi are running at a pace that rewards a different kind of leader. Someone who can move at Douyin speed, read a KTV dinner, and turn a three-line WeChat from a CEO into a campaign that ships tomorrow.

That is not Western experience becoming irrelevant. It is a shift in which experiences are doing the heavy lifting now.

The multinational clients that once justified a larger expat layer are quieter in China today. The centre of commercial gravity has moved.

The quiet localisation

The expats who have stayed mostly arrived a decade or more ago. They speak fluent Mandarin, they have built a life in market, and most are no longer on expat packages. Their roles were gradually localised, often on their own initiative, because they saw where the economics were heading.

This is not a failure story. It is a story of people and structures finding a new equilibrium.

The harder question for networks

Where it gets uncomfortable is at the holding group level. If your China business still leans heavily on expatriate leadership to signal global capability to headquarters, it is worth asking who that signal is really for.

The networks quietly performing best in China now have local CEOs, local creative leadership, and local client leads. Expats, where they exist, sit in specific roles: global account stewardship, regional talent mobility, particular craft skills. They are rarely running the business day to day.

That is a meaningful structural shift, even if it has been hard to talk about openly.

What this means for hiring

When I am briefed on a China leadership search now, the conversation is different from 2018.

The old brief asked for global network experience, bilingual capability, and cultural fluency, roughly in that order. The new brief inverts it. Cultural fluency and commercial judgement in market come first. Bilingual capability is essential. Global network experience sits further down the list.

The candidates who meet this bar are rare. They tend to be locals or returnees with ten plus years of multinational exposure, who have spent the last five years learning the parallel universe of Chinese social commerce. They are almost never on the open market.

A principle worth holding

The practical question is not whether to localise China leadership. That direction has largely decided itself.

The more useful question is whether the rest of the regional structure has caught up. If the China role is still being talked about internally as a stepping stone for an ambitious Westerner, it is worth pausing on whether that narrative still matches what the market is actually asking for.

China is not the hardest market in APAC because it is complex. It is the hardest market because it has changed the question.