U.S.-educated academics are increasingly returning to teach and spearhead special programs
By MARA HVISTENDAHL
Shanghai
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 the Taiwanese-born 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
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."
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