Came across this article as CIO Asia magazine on the state of strategic HR there.

The author, Charles Moore of Heidrick & Struggles in Singapore believes Asia is lagging behind in "appreciating how HR has changed and how critical strategic HR can become." He believes that this is partially a function of a lack of HR professionals equipped to handle these newly strategic roles, but also due to a traditional tendency to resist hiring aggressive, persistent HR people. 

The interesting part is this warning:

The
disturbing trend for HR is that the focus on talent management is being
driven more by CEO’s and not by HR executives, simply because there are
not enough HR executives equipped to deal with this. Companies cannot
have great products without great people, and they cannot sell great
products without great people. Only companies that focus on HR’s talent
management role will become truly great.

To paraphrase: if HR can’t figure out how to focus on talent management instead of pushing paper, those responsibilities (and the opportunities that follow) are simply going to be taken away from them.