The People’s Republic of China has launched several initiatives to stem the flow of its brightest researchers and scientists to foreign shores, as also to incentivise highly qualified emigrants to return.
China’s central ministry of education has constituted a $97.5-million seed fund for 20,000 returnees to pursue research in the sciences, according to the official China Daily. In addition, the state-run Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) has devised a programme offering $325,000 (Rs.1.9 crore) to returnee scientists. The programme has met with some success, bringing back 1,568 scientists in the past decade. Moreover in an effort to reach out to young Chinese overseas, the government has launched “root-seeking” summer camps, funding as many as 30,000 Chinese residing in 55 countries to travel to China every year to make them “more familiar with their ethnicity”.
According to a New York Times report, China is investing $250 billion (Rs.1,473,750 crore) per year in developing human capital. Higher education institutions are being upgraded to global standards with the launch of two programmes — Project 211 and Project 985. The former aims to transform 100 Chinese universities into world-class globally ranked institutions by 2015. The objective of Project 985 is to develop China’s own Ivy League colleges. In the first phase, the project includes nine universities while the second phase, launched in 2004, includes 40 varsities.
The results of this massive investment in China’s higher education and research institutions are becoming visible. Several Chinese varsities are moving up the league tables of the world’s best universities. Two Chinese universities feature among the Top 50 in the World University Rankings 2013 published by Times Higher Education. In the Top 500, 16 Chinese universities have made the cut against seven from India.
Currently, China is the third largest education hub worldwide after the US and the UK with 328,000 international students, according to the Institute of International Education. By 2020, it will attract 500,000 foreign students. On the other hand, the number of overseas students in India’s 35,000 colleges and 700 universities aggregates 27,000.
In research and development output, China, which spends 1.84 percent (cf. India’s 0.9 percent) of GDP on R&D, is a rising star. According to a 2014 report of the US National Science Foundation, China is now the third-largest producer of refereed research papers, behind only the European Union (EU) bloc and the United States. The number of research papers authored by Chinese scientists grew by an average of more than 15 percent annually between 2001-2011, rising from 3 percent of global research output to 11 percent over the past decade — even as published research papers from the combined 28 nations of the EU and the United States have declined.