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Now, let's look at some of the current reforms that are underway within China,
within Chinese educational system.
One of them is the introduction of part-time deans who still hold positions
overseas but come and act as the dean within these universities.
And the advantage is that they don't have to worry about angering local faculty by
introducing strict hiring codes or firing people.
So they're willing to introduce these major reforms.
A great example is the Shanghai University of Finance and
Economics, which has moved dramatically up the national rankings
due largely to the jump in the overseas publications by the faculty.
And there, that school has a part-time dean.
That same dean, and then other schools around China,
have introduced what they call the dual track promotion system where returned
academics are held to higher standards than locally trained academics
based on Western criteria of publications, and basically, publications.
But they also get much higher salaries.
So the risks are higher, because they can be denied tenure,
if they don't publish enough within six years.
But if local PhDs want to take those same risks,
they can take those risks, sign up for that same system, get the higher salary,
but it'll be much harder for them to publish as much overseas, because they
won't have the training, the same kind of training that these returned academics do.
A third example is what the Chinese call Special Academic Zones.
And here, we see the establishment of institutes within
universities where the faculty are all returnees.
Some of them are also foreign faculty, and
they have very little administrative interference.
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She told me that the 1000 Talents Plan is very important for
her university, because she said that the university was full of leftists.
The government, not the university but the city government.
And they were not willing to carry out reforms so
that if a 1000 Talents Plan guy wanted to come back, and
his returnee wife, his wife that came back with him was an American citizen,
she'd have to go back to the US every year to renew her visa and
that they would not give her a long-term residence permit.
But because of the 1000 Talents Program,
the city government largely under pressure from the Communist party, has agreed to
give someone like her a green card or a long-term residence permit,
something that this official said we didn't have before, but now we do.
So she was very positive about that.
Other studies have shown that
if you really want to carry out reforms within some departments or some schools,
you need at least 35% of the faculty to be returnees.
This was a paper I read awhile ago.
But there are still other problems.
Sometimes promises made to returnees are not always kept, though that's,
I think, somewhat more in the past than these days, but better housing,
salaries, lighter workload.
I know returnees who have not been granted what they were promised
before they came back.
Some of these policies,
these preferential policies, also given to returnees who may sometimes
just not be that much better than the local PhDs, and that can create hostility.
So I remember about ten years ago, I did some interviews at Yunnan University
in a city called Kunming, and that's in Southwest China, and
very few Chinese who are coming back to China would choose to go to Kunming.
It's a lovely city, but it's far away from the coast.
So the Mainlanders who come back and are willing to work in
Yunnan University are not necessarily the best people trained overseas,
they're people who grew up in Kunming.
And they get all these benefits for coming back, yet
someone who may have been trained in the Chinese Academy of Sciences or
at Peking University or at Tsinghua University.
And then come down to Kunming, they could be just as good if not even slightly
better than these people who came back, and yet they get no preferential policies.
So in Kunming, it was possible, in Yunnan University, you could find some
hostility between the returnees and the locals.
And the returnees just didn't have large enough numbers to defend themselves.
Now, some university presidents are not very keen on
bringing back large numbers of overseas academics,
partly because they fear the pressure from these returnees
who they see are just too competitive, maybe for themselves or
maybe for locally trained scholars who are in their university.
And I was very fortunate, I was invited to give a presentation to Lee Young-Chul.
And at that time, I watched him have a confrontation
with the president of a pretty good university in China, and
the confrontation was largely over the willingness of that president
to bring back foreign-trained PhDs to work in his university.
So having watched that confrontation, I decided to run a test.
Using data from 1999 to 2013, for
27 top universities in China, which we combined with a data
set of high quality returnees who participated in the Changjiang and
the 1000 Talents programs, we found, first,
that universities with presidents who had PhDs from overseas recruited almost two or
more high-end returnees every year than universities
whose presidents had gone abroad as a visiting scholar or
who had no overseas educational research experience.
Second, we also thought that presidents who rose to the top within the university
might not like returnees, because they challenge local PhDs and the president's
personal network that he had built up within the university as he rose.
And what we found was that universities whose president was appointed from
outside the university brought back at least one or
more high-end returnees who were on these national programs than
universities whose president rose to that position from within the university.
David ZweigChair Professor of the Division of Social Science and Director of Center on China’s Transnational Relations
