Description

More than 1.6 million Chinese students went abroad between 1978 and 2009, and 32 percent returned. Recently, outbound number jumped to 385,000 in 2011. Most now receive only a one- or two-year MA, not a PhD, and combined with expanding domestic college graduates from within China, 30% wait over three months to find a job. Thus “reverse migration” has limits if the supply of returnees surpasses demand for their skills. Still, our regression models demonstrate that those who studied in Japan and Canada were more likely to have larger incomes than members of the public who had no overseas education but similar levels of domestic education. The “Length of Time Working Overseas” affected income, while studying and working in Canada increased the returnees’ annual income relative to returnees from Japan. However, costly overseas study may not be compensated for as long as 10 years.

David Zweig is Chair Professor, Division of Social Science, Director, Center on Environment, Energy and Resource Policy (www.cctr.ust.hk), HKUST, and Associate Dean, School of Humanities and Social Sciences, HKUST. He is an Adjunct Professor, School of Social Sciences and Humanities, National University of Defense Technology, Changsha, Hunan and Deputy Director of the South China Center on China’s Globalization, Guangzhou. He is the former president of the Hong Kong Political Science Association. He taught at The Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy, Tufts University, the Department of Political Studies, Queen’s University, Kingston, Ontario, and the Department of Political Science, Florida International University (Miami, FL). He is the author of four books, including Internationalizing China: domestic interests and global linkages (Cornell Univ. Press, 2002), which will be out in a Chinese edition from Renmin University Press in 2013. He edited special issues of Pacific Affairs (September 2008) and the Journal of International Migration and Integration (Fall 2006), both of which focus on migration of ethnic Chinese in East Asia, and recently organized a special issue of Asian Survey, focusing on Hong Kong- Mainland relations. He has also edited five other books in both English and Chinese. He is currently editing a book on US-China energy competition in third countries and writing a book on Mainlanders who studied overseas and returned to China.