China's Global Search for Talent: A 40 Year Retrospective

Prof. David ZWEIG, Chair Professor of Division of Social Science, and Director of Center on China's Transnational Relations gave an IPP Distinguished Lecture on “China's Global Search for Talent: A 40 Year Retrospective” on 12 April 2019.

Professor ZWEIG has been studying China’s talent policy and its efforts to turn its efforts to turn its chronic brain drain into a brain gain for over 28 years. He has carried out more than a dozen surveys, some with the Chinese Ministry of Education, Huazhong University of Science and Technology (Wuhan), and with the Center on China and Globalization. He has focused on returning scientists, academics, entrepreneurs, and MA students, as well looking at the “Diaspora Option,” China’s effort to encourage Chinese students who remain abroad to help national modernization.

In the lecture, Prof ZWEIG shared some of his findings and insights on this 40-year effort that began in 1978 when DENG Xiaoping first argued that China had to let its students go abroad if it wanted to catch up with the West. He also discussed with participants about how successful has the talent policy of Chinese government been in the decades and the current state of China’s policy on overseas study in light of the current global confrontation with the US.