The 25-year-old Singaporean was treated with suspicion by her Chinese co-workers at Edelman, an international public relations company, because they saw her as a threat.

Worse, its Chinese clients bypassed her, preferring to deal with her local colleagues.

'I was a foreigner but didn't look 'foreign' enough to them,' she recalls.

The year was 2002 and Ms Ong was an accounts manager in the bustling, dog-eat-dog city of Guangzhou.

However, she overcame the prejudices and in three years, rose to head Edelman's Guangzhou office, the youngest general manager in the company's global network.

Today, at age 31, she is its general manager of marketing practice for China, based in Shanghai.

Her success is typical of the rapidly growing number of young Singaporeans scaling China's corporate ladder at a swifter pace than they would at home.

There is yet another new trend: Increasingly, China has become a stepping stone for Singaporeans to a posting in the West - an emerging brain drain from Singapore that was noted last month by Minister Mentor Lee Kuan Yew.

Typically, they arrive in China as employees of Singapore companies.

Soon, their experience and skills make them attractive to Western multinational corporations (MNCs) hungry for talent that can understand Chinese culture and navigate its huge and relatively untapped market.

There are about 5,000 Singaporeans working in China and almost 100 of them are in MNCs - in senior posts.

Although more 30-somethings are filling these positions, the average age of a senior manager in China is 46 compared to 53 in Singapore.

A new study by the Hay Group, a human resource consultancy, also finds that senior managers in China earn around 6 per cent less than their Singapore counterparts.

But challenging career opportunities, perks like a car and driver, plus being sought after globally, more than than make up for the lower pay, say human resource experts.

In China, Singaporeans get the opportunity to 'deal with irregularities and grey areas', such as laws that keep changing, says Mr Lee Kam Choon, who has over 30 years of experience in regional human resource management.

For Ms Ong, there was also the personal challenge of overcoming her early woes, which she did through her smarts and cross-cultural savvy.

'I spent a lot of money organising lunches and karaoke sessions - which I actually don't like - to connect with my colleagues the Chinese way,' says the bubbly general manager who speaks Mandarin as well as four southern Chinese dialects.

To impress on Guangzhou clients that she is a foreigner, she had blonde streaks put into her hair, spoke English to them and got her colleagues to translate.

And as part of her strategy to nail contracts from the likes of Chinese state-owned electronics giant TCL, she gave them presents during 'laowai' or foreign festivals such as Christmas and Thanksgiving, 'not during Chinese New Year when they would be showered with gifts'.

The demand for foreign talent is fuelled by the growing number of MNCs moving their regional headquarters to China, where local expertise in senior management is lacking, says Mr Goh Hern Yin, Hay Group's reward information services manager.

'Feedback from clients is that MNCs value people with China experience. Very often, these people leave China to take on more regional or global roles,' he adds.

One of them is Mr Toh Hong Giep, 36, who was posted this year to Finland, Nokia's head office, to head sales applications in its IT unit. He was Nokia's senior IT manager in Beijing for three years.

Mr Toh says he brings to the head-office 'the knowledge of the challenges in China, one of our major markets'.

But the cleaner air and better work-life balance in Europe also helped convince the father of two young children to move out of pollution-choked Beijing.

Mr Goh said he knows close to 100 Singaporeans in senior positions in MNCs in China, and noted that the salary gap with Singapore is closing.

Basic pay in China is rising by 9 per cent yearly against 3.8 per cent here. Singapore's higher living costs also means that a manager's pay in China goes further, he added.

But money is not the sole motivator for Singaporean Vinny Kuah, who is single and has lived in Shanghai and Beijing since 2001.

'The nature of this market is that the stakes are higher and the scale of the projects bigger than in Singapore,' said the 35-year-old.

Her current project, for example, is a vast 270,000 sq m development for retail, offices and residences in Beijing. In comparison, Singapore's largest mall VivoCity covers 139,000 sq m.

Ms Kuah received a 30 per cent pay rise last year when she left the China office of a Singapore property company to join Indonesian real estate conglomerate Lippo Group as its China marketing director.

Now, she is getting job offers topping her salary by another 30 per cent.

However, she and other Singaporean expatriates acknowledge that their window of opportunity could be shrinking as China produces more graduates fluent in English and better attuned to international business practices.

As more foreign talent floods China, companies are also slashing expatriate perks, offering a reduced lump-sum allowance instead of separate allowances for housing and children's education.

Ms Eileen Tan pays almost $2,000 a month in fees at an international school in Shanghai for her two children, aged nine and five. Still, she and her husband have no plans to go home after eight years in China.

Said the 33-year-old, who runs the China office of global fabric company Valley Forge: 'In Singapore, all my clients were Singaporeans.

'Here in Shanghai, I get people from all nations, even the Middle East. It's hard to top such international exposure.'

clare@sph.com.sg