Elite returnees propel China to new heights
Print Edition
Deng Weiwei felt a sense of loss when he found out that his former schoolmates were working on the launch of China’s Tiangong-2 space laboratory, while he could only follow the news on social media.
On April 27 this year, Deng, a tenured associate professor at Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, quit his job.
After giving his last lecture, he returned to China after living in the United States for 15 years.
He is among hundreds of thousands of Chinese expatriates who have returned to China. Last year, 432,500 Chinese students and researchers repatriated.
After China launched its plan to attract Chinese talent living overseas home, more than 100,000 Chinese expatriates came back, lured by the promise of a brighter future.
The Chinese government — at the central and local levels — has helped the cream of the crop to repatriate. It has set up a scientific fund to finance their research work.
Last year, China invested 1.57 trillion yuan (US$235.6 billion) in research and development (R&D).
Today, China has become the world’s second-largest investor in R&D.
One of the elite Chinese returnees is Wang Zhonglin, who was a tenured professor at the Georgia Institute of Technology and an academic at the European Academy of Sciences. He led a group of 20 researchers in America. Today, Wang can select 200 researchers to join his program in China.
In Hefei City in eastern China, Wang Junfeng is among eight Chinese researchers from Harvard University who have jointly developed a world-leading high field magnetic laboratory in the city.
“Scientific research conditions in China were far more advanced than before. We had an independent lab here, which was nearly impossible in the US,” said Wang.
China’s effort to lure overseas Chinese talent home is paying off. Returned researchers are playing leading roles in advanced technologies and innovation.
Indeed, they have been instrumental in cutting-edge technologies such as China’s manned space flight, the Tianhe supercomputer, the Beidou navigation project, and quantum communication.
Last year, China launched the world’s first quantum satellite, Quantum Experiments at Space Scale. Lu Zhaoyang, who returned from Cambridge University with key theories, was a member of the core research team.
He and his colleagues are now making more breakthroughs in quantum theory, communication and calculation.
Their achievements — including the distribution of entangled photon pairs over 1,200 kilometers — have secured China’s leading position in quantum research.
On September 12 this year, participants at the annual meeting of the Western Returned Scholars Association shared their advanced knowledge and innovative ideas.
“It never requires a reason to return home,” said Bai Chunli, president of the Chinese Academy of Science, who studied abroad in the 1980s.
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