China tries to end brain drain, lure foreign-educated talent

As a young biologist at the University of Michigan, Chen Xiaowei had plenty to like about life in the United States. He was paid well as a researcher and enjoyed raising his family in Ann Arbor, a town he remembers as beautiful, friendly and highly educated.

But an offer from a Chinese university for him to return home to Beijing was too generous not to consider. In addition to a comparable salary, he was promised enough startup research money that he wouldn’t have to worry about pursuing grants and, as he saw it, there was a chance to make a bigger difference in China. So in 2014 he moved back with his wife and two children.

“I feel freer to pursue my best ideas,” Chen said. He said he had received such generous support that he was able to study a disease through symptoms in both the liver and muscles simultaneously – something he said he would have been able to do in the US because of limitations on grants, which were often tied to projects instead of researchers.

Chen, who earned a doctorate in physiology at Michigan in 2008, has joined thousands of high-achieving overseas Chinese recruited to come home through the 1,000 Talents programme, one of many state efforts launched in recent years to reverse a decades-long brain drain.

China, the world’s second-largest economy and one of the fastest-growing, sees a need to bring home more of its brightest as it works to transform its largely labour-intensive, low-tech economy into one fueled by innovation in science and technology.