I did the same thing around five years ago. Am still in Hong Kong and still employed (for now), but we've been shedding staff for years and like most financial services companies are probably not going on a hiring spree any time soon. Having said that, I still see jobs posted occasionally.

Track down the recruiters here - they shouldn't be too hard to find. Somebody mentioned Robert Walters which is a good start, maybe also Aston Carter and Chandler Macleod. Recruiters seem to find me on LinkedIn pretty regularly but that's probably because I've built up a network of other people in the industry.

Might be tough also as they generally prefer people with industry experience, and there are plenty of them on the market given recent layoffs, so competition will be fierce. Might be better outside of financial services but I kind of doubt it.

For me - I got a job with a consulting company whose client was an investment bank, so got my foot in the door for a job I probably wouldn't normally have been considered for. Once I had the experience (there's a lot to get used to) I switched to working for the client. Probably difficult to emulate but you never know. I initially got offered a job at a blue chip consulting company at a terrible rate, but ended up at an obscure one at a merely not-so-great rate. It eventually improved but you might want to lower your expectations in advance. At least the tax is low (although if you're American I guess you get screwed on paying US tax anyway) although housing is nuts.

Oh, and Hong Kong and mainland China are like two different countries. You can pretty much ignore any advice which relates to the latter. Hong Kong is a very easy place to live in - I love it. People generally struggle more in the mainland. However, if your wife is in Hong Kong you could consider working in Shenzen, over the border, although might be tough to pull off (and the commute to see eachother would be unpleasant).

Not really - the motive is the same, giant corporation taking secrets for commercial benefit vs giant corporation (which happens to be owned by the Chinese government) taking secrets for commercial benefit. The Chinese government, with its many state-owned operations, is not equivalent to the US government - the Chinese government as much concerned about running businesses as it is about governing.

Note that I'm not condoning either the Chinese or the US behaviour, I'm simply trying to inject some perspective into the current debate which often consists of hysterical 'us and them' finger-pointing, just as used to occur with the Russians who the US now gets along quite well with. It all reminds me of Orwell's "We're at war with Eastasia. We have always been at war with Eastasia."

To provide an alternative and perhaps more relevant example of non-Chinese industrial espionage, the US accused the French government of industrial espionage in the 90s, and vice versa.

Example of alleged recent US espionage: Hilton accused by Starwood. It's extremely common for US firms to hire ex-employees of other firms to achieve a similar thing to what the Chinese are accused of here.

I frequently see middle class Hong Kong investment banking employees taking lunch time naps too. It's very normal, and not really a bad idea for people who work long, tiring hours.

>> The hope is that this will be useful in Asia for handwriting recognition, because Asian scripts use a lot of variation in line thickness

Hmm, I get the feeling that this is 99% what a western company thinks they want in Asia, and 1% possibly actually desirable over here. I'm reasonably familiar with Chinese, Japanese and Korean and they're all happily represented by fonts with no line variation. Hand-painted calligraphy or some of the fancier fonts are about the only place I've seen line variation used.

I've also yet to meet a Chinese person (other than the older generation who very rarely use a computer) who prefers to input their Chinese characters by drawing them. For everyone I've met, from my wife, to her family, my friends, and my colleagues, they all prefer to input it as some form of pinyin (using latin characters), as it's not only faster but also because a lot of them have been doing it for so long they've forgotten how to write many of the characters (at least, without pausing to think about it). They also all use standard pens to write hand-written notes, which have, you guess it, no variation in line thickness.

There might be useful for other scripts I'm not so familiar with though (such as Thai or Arabic - although I bet they write their hand written notes with standard pens, too), although usually the markets the companies producing this stuff are after are those I've described above - China, Korea and Japan.