Talk to anyone trying to run a business on the mainland, and you will hear a litany of familiar grumbles.
Companies simply cannot recruit the staff they need. The employees they can get are woefully underqualified, and expect absurdly high salaries.
Even worse, there is no point devoting time and money to training staff up to an acceptable standard, because after a few months promising employees will promptly jump ship to join a business rival, wasting all the effort involved.
Strange as it may seem for a country with a workforce one billion strong, the mainland is suffering an acute labour shortage.
Or rather, it is suffering an acute shortage of skilled labour. There is no lack of warm bodies, but companies looking to recruit qualified personnel from skilled factory workers through specialists like accountants or engineers to senior managers are likely to encounter a distinct scarcity.
The mainland is not alone in this problem of course. In its annual Asian Development Outlook published yesterday, the Asian Development Bank warned that the region 'lacks a wide class of occupational skills relevant to a modern economy'. Moreover, the problem is not limited to a handful of places, 'but is prevalent enough to present a genuine risk to the region's long-run growth'.
Without sufficient numbers of suitably qualified professionals, says the ADB, productivity deteriorates, capital returns fall, wages rise, staff turnover increases and administrative costs go up. As a result business efficiency declines and 'whole industries and even entire economies may suffer'.