Debate: Brain drain
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Tao Duanfang: Look inward for real progress
China suffers one of the worst brain drains in the world, with more than 1 million Chinese not returning home after finishing their studies abroad. Some scholars say that if China fails to check the trend, it would pose a major threat to its comprehensive national competitiveness, and eventually its future.
Other scholars suggest the country should implement favorable policies and offer preferential treatment to lure back its talent from abroad. Still others say the Chinese authorities should enact restrictive policies to check the brain drain.
During the Warring States Period (475-221BC), King Zhao of Yan state wanted talent to help invigorate his kingdom. Realizing Zhao's desperation, an official named Guo Wei advised him that he should start treating the talented persons already around him kindly and making good use of them if he really wanted to attract more talent (from within as well as outside the kingdom) to serve the state. Zhao accepted Guo's advice and appointed some local talent to important posts. The result: people like strategist Yue Yi and thinker Zou Yan came to serve the state.
If we assume there are no national boundaries for talented persons, then talented Chinese are as valuable as their foreign counterparts. If an enterprise, a local government or a country goes all out to attract overseas talent by offering them special privileges but turns a blind eye to competent and creative people at home, local experts, and overseas talent will doubt its sincerity.
China is a very populous country. Each year millions of fresh college graduates in a wide number of subjects, many of them potential talent enter the job market. But since their levels of creativity, knowledge and intellect are different, a wise employer should recruit them on the basis of their abilities.
If the country treats the talented people available at home properly and gets the best out of them, it would create an atmosphere in which experts thrive, and succeed in attracting overseas brains as well.
A country or an enterprise can have many talented people. But only those who are put to full use can be called real talent. If a large number of people in a country realize they cannot give full scope to their talent in the prevailing atmosphere, they will choose to migrate to a place which they feel would help them realize their intellectual quest.
Some Chinese employers do want to attract top-quality personnel. But the problem is that they don't have a clear plan to let overseas-returned Chinese display their talent fully. Sometimes, government enterprises recruit overseas returnees only to display them as "ornaments" of political achievements. In such situations, able as they may be, the overseas-returned talented people don't get a chance to give shape to their ideas.
The so-called special policies to attract brains from overseas are questionable, too. Talent, both homegrown and overseas-returned, need favorable space and atmosphere, and practical guarantees to develop properly. By creating the right environment or system that benefits domestic talent, the authorities would be sending out encouraging signals to Chinese talent settled abroad to return home and help the country achieve still greater heights.
In fact, most of the top Chinese brains settled abroad might not even want "preferential treatment" but only a normal and systematic development environment.
Before talking about how to deal with China's brain drain, the authorities should create more opportunities for local talent. If they can put the talent of competent local people to best use and create an atmosphere and mechanism that would help talent flourish, Chinese settled abroad and pure-bred overseas talent would flock to China.
The author is a columnist based in Canada.
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