U.S.-educated academics are increasingly returning to teach and spearhead special programs
As a professor at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School in the 1990s, Yusheng Zheng used to get together with other Chinese scholars and dream of going home.
There were few Chinese business professors in the United States, and they formed a small, closely knit, and successful community. Still, Mr. Zheng and his friends felt their talents could be put to better use elsewhere.
“We would say, ‘Why can’t we start a business school in China?’” he recalls. “China was developing so quickly. There were so many things to study, and business education was not very well developed. We believed we could make more contributions there.”
In 2002 the scholars got their chance when two Chinese administrators showed up to recruit them back — en masse — to lead a new business school.
Mr. Zheng had been in the United States since the 1980s, when he left China to pursue a Ph.D. at Columbia University. But he didn’t have to consider the offer long.
Returning to his native Shanghai, he became associate dean of Cheung Kong Graduate School of Business, where today 27 of 35 faculty members are Chinese academics educated in the United States.
The Graduate School of Business is one of three ambitious programs established by the Hong Kong billionaire Li Ka-shing to improve the quality of Chinese higher education, in part by drawing back some of the thousands of Chinese scholars who have left since China began opening up in the 1980s.
The Cheung Kong schools are the most extreme example of an aggressive recruitment scheme that has resulted in what is sometimes called China’s “reverse brain drain.” In a remarkable about-face from early Chinese policy on overseas study, government programs and individual academic departments alike now offer competitive benefits and salaries to candidates interested in returning from abroad.
Combined with China’s rapid economic growth, the programs are attracting an increasing number of sea turtles, as they are known. (The Mandarin word for “sea turtle,” haigui, is a homonym for “returnee.”) Between 1978 and 2005, 770,300 students went abroad, and less than a quarter returned. But the majority of those who did return came back after 2000, with 35,000 coming in 2005 alone.
Returnees tend to assume positions of leadership, with the power to introduce new teaching methods, direct research, or oversee curricular reform. In contrast to the sense of longing that shaped his 1990s gatherings in America, Mr. Zheng describes a palpable excitement among his Cheung Kong colleagues.
“In the U.S., you’re one of thousands of people who end up there,” he says. “In China every one of us chooses to be here.”
The flow of returnees back into China is now so noticeable that it has prompted a backlash. Cultural conflict, resentment from locals, and even infighting among returnees are common.
But these issues are growing pains, most say, that will disappear over time — if the academic environment in China continues to improve.
Serving the Country
The Chinese government didn’t always see foreign universities as talent incubators. In the 1980s, as China’s brightest students fled to the United States, officials at the State Education Commission, now the Ministry of Education, grew concerned. In 1988 they backed passport controls that required many Chinese studying overseas to return to China upon completing their studies, making it impossible for them to gain meaningful experiences and contacts abroad.
The following year, the Tiananmen massacre made the remaining overseas Chinese even more reluctant to return.
But as talent continued to drain out of China over the next decade, the central government changed its stance. Officials unveiled a series of welcoming slogans, proposing that students “serve the country” from abroad.
To sell skeptics on their homeland, the education commission’s foreign-affairs bureau financed short lecture and research trips to China. The hope was that scholars would gradually strengthen ties with China, returning when the right opportunities presented themselves.
Homesick scholars found their chance in 1998, when the central government unveiled a project designed to channel millions of dollars into a handful of elite universities in an effort to bring them to international prominence. It gave nine top universities the equivalent of $120-million each in grant money and stipulated that 20 percent go to hiring from overseas.
Private donors contributed as well. In addition to financing the Cheung Kong universities, Mr. Li’s foundation bankrolls the Cheung Kong Scholars Program, which provides annual bonuses of up to 100,000 yuan ($15,000) for recruitment of public-university professors from overseas. Since 1998, more than 800 foreign-educated professors, most of them returnees, have taken positions through this program.
Today, individual universities lead their own recruitment drives, says David Zweig, director of the Center on China’s Transnational Relations at Hong Kong University of Science and Technology and the author of several papers on the reverse brain drain. To boost their positions in international rankings, he says, universities “want people who can publish in Western journals.” That is easier for researchers fluent in English.
C.S. Kiang, dean of Peking University’s College of Environmental Science, was one such recruit. In 2001 Mr. Kiang was on the verge of retiring from the Georgia Institute of Technology, where he had taught in and directed the atmospheric-sciences program, when he flew to Beijing to help the city work on cleaning up its air for the 2008 Olympics.
Rubbing shoulders with Peking University administrators, Mr. Kiang, who was born in Shanghai but raised in Taiwan, ended up on the steering committee for the university’s effort to merge three departments into a central college.
Lacking what he calls the “personal baggage” of locally educated intellectuals who earned enemies during the Cultural Revolution, Mr. Kiang unified a divided faculty around the project. “You were the one who made it happen,” he recalls Xu Zhihong, then president of Peking University, saying later. “Why don’t you just be dean?”
When he assumed the post the following year, Mr. Kiang was given a mandate to shape the outlook of the new college. He introduced a program he calls, in English, the Four I’s: internationalization, interdisciplinarity, integration, and innovation. Even the college’s name was his idea, he says.
There was one complication: Mr. Kiang’s salary was 10 to 20 times higher than what local faculty made. He tried to turn it down, he says, but university administrators, eager to broadcast their generosity to other potential returnees, insisted. (Mr. Kiang ended up donating part of the money to an environmental fund.)
The strategy worked. Mr. Kiang was Peking University’s first foreign-educated dean, but today he has been joined by the Engineering Institute dean, Chen Shiyi, formerly of the Johns Hopkins University, and Yi Rao, dean of the School of Life Sciences, who was recruited from Northwestern University. Prominent returnees at rival Tsinghua University include the University of California at Berkeley economist Qian Yingyi, dean of the School of Economics and Management, and Shi Yigong, vice director of the Institute of Biomedicine, who was hired from Princeton University.
Mr. Kiang, meanwhile, has used his post to create a jet-setting career that includes regular appearances at World Economic Forum and Club of Rome meetings, along with an advisory position with Nelson Mandela’s Global Elders, a group that includes the former U.S. president Jimmy Carter, the Nobel Peace Prize winner Desmond Tutu of South Africa, and the British businessman Richard Branson."I’ve gotten tremendous exposure globally, the way I wouldn’t have been exposed at Georgia Tech,” he says. “People go to Beijing. They don’t pass through Atlanta.”
Barriers to Change
But change doesn’t always come easily.
At less prestigious universities outside of Shanghai and Beijing, sea turtles face the stigma that they are returning to China because they failed overseas. In 2003 Mr. Zweig interviewed a cross-section of local and returnee scholars at Yunnan University, in the southwestern city of Kunming. “We found a lot of resentment among locals against returnees, a lot of mocking of them,” he says.
Conflict can intensify as the number and quality of returnees increase. In 2003, administrators at Peking University, themselves returnees, championed hiring reforms that would have favored candidates with overseas experience, requiring professors, among other things, to teach in a second language. The reforms provoked such opposition among locally educated faculty that the university had to scrap aspects of the plan, according to Stanley Rosen, director of the East Asian Studies Center at the University of Southern California, who closely followed the reform process.
There is even infighting among returnees, says Cao Cong, a research fellow at the State University of New York’s Levin Institute who has written a book on China’s scientific elite. As more people return, hiring policies are tightening. Early returnees who assumed powerful posts under lenient recruitment campaigns can make things difficult for later, more qualified arrivals, he says. “The government says it really wants people to return, but at the work-unit level or university level, it’s really complicated.”
Sea turtles also come under fire for spreading themselves too thin. Students say they appreciate returnees’ overseas networks, but many devote themselves to research, leaving little time for the classroom.
Ye Xin, a Ph.D. candidate in mechanical engineering at Zhejiang University, in Hangzhou, says the only returnees at his university are part-time professors who maintain posts abroad. “They help the university raise its profile, and maybe they come and give a lecture once or twice a year,” he says. “We see them very little.”
The End of Returnee Fever?
The best hope for ironing out these differences may be in the continued development of Chinese higher education. As Chinese universities become more competitive, turning out better graduates, the emphasis on foreign experience will decrease, some scholars say.
Chen Zhimin, an international-relations professor at Fudan University, in Shanghai, says that while secondand third-tier universities may still uphold unequal hiring practices, his university is moving toward equity.
“In the past we had very special policies for these returnees,” says Mr. Chen, who followed the more traditional model of a Chinese Ph.D. bolstered by an 18-month fellowship at Harvard. “The threshold is higher now. If you don’t have good performance abroad, then you will not get special treatment.”
Increasingly, he said, returnees looking for positions on Fudan’s faculty must compete in the hiring pool with locally trained scholars. As testament to China’s pulling power, however, the sea turtles are still coming — along with a small but growing group of Western scholars interested in working on the mainland. “We just hired an Irish researcher to come in at the bottom, like the rest of us,” Mr. Chen says. “We’re seeing a new trend.”
http://chronicle.com Section: International Volume 55, Issue 17, Page A20
