While Alibaba’s September IPO was a big event, on the whole U.S. listings of Chinese technology companies aren’t such big news anymore. NetEase, led by No. 19 William Ding, went public in the U.S. in 2000. Search engine Baidu , led by No. 2Robin Li, did so in 2006. Rather than listings, the bigger story this year may be the expanding ways that Chinese companies are tapping into U.S. and other international resources.

Take Bryan Catanzaro, a Ph.D. from Berkeley, who works in Silicon Valley on deep learning by computers. He’s thrilled to have teamed up at a new job this year with Andrew Ng and Adam Coates, with whom he collaborated while they were at Stanford and he was at chip firm Nvidia. A new startup? Rather, they’re employed in California by Baidu.

China’s giants Baidu, Alibaba and Tencent, a.k.a. BAT, and others will want such talent to stay in the top rung of China’s Internet world, or among China’s Richest. Jack Ma of Alibaba is now No. 1, Ma Huateng of Tencent is No. 3.

“If you look at the BAT companies, they are already at unsustainably high market share percentages in their core Chinese markets. That is why you see Tencent aggressively expanding Wechat–successfully–outside of China and Baidu and Ali trying to emulate that,” says Gary Rieschel, managing partner of Qiming Ventures in Shanghai, with $1 billion invested in China.

Baidu’s Robin Li

“Senior foreign talent will be critical, especially for the more complex the product and service,” Rieschel says. This year saw high-level defections from Western companies such as Microsoft to Chinese world-beaters.

It’s not about just a grab for people. It is also capital flow from China. “The main purpose for the big China Internet companies to be in the U.S. is to find partnerships with startups or invest in technology, although they would also like to be in the market,” says Chuan Thor, a managing director for Highland Capital of the U.S. in Shanghai.

U.S. startups “now love to take money from Chinese partners,” Thor says. Why? “One reason is that they will pay relatively high valuations.” Compared with China, U.S. valuations are reasonable. Growth potential of the Chinese suitors is another attraction.

“Talent, capital and technology will all be more integrated in the future,” Rieschel says. Among BAT and Xiaomi, the Chinese mobile-phone star, there have been over 100 venture investments and M&A transactions within the last four years, Reischel says. “That will continue apace.”Yet there is risk ahead for China, too, Thor cautions, especially when it comes to business culture. Japanese businesses sought to globalize when the country was awash with capital two decades ago, too, but many didn’t succeed. Will China succeed? “It isn’t about money being available,” he says. “There are bigger questions in the future about culture and reputation.”

– Follow me on Twitter @rflannerychina