5 - Talent

Summary

In examining the effect of Chinese talent-attracting programs launched by the Chinese government, with few exceptions, studies have rarely assessed these programs empirically and pertinently. We intend to fill the gap by assessing an important central government program – the Youth Thousand Talents Program – in Chapter Five. We start with proposing a transnational migration matrix of the academics to clarify the dynamic mechanism of achieving an academic brain gain at the high end. The transnational migration matrix suggests that the academics with high ability have competitiveness in both overseas and domestic academic job markets and can especially enjoy a higher salary and academic reputation in the host (overseas) academic job market due to the more mature mechanism of academic evaluation relative to their home country. The results show that some scholars whose last employer’s academic ranking is among the world’s Top 100 have stronger willingness to return. Compared to scholars with an overseas tenure-track position, those with a tenure position or a permanent position tended to stay overseas, the rate of their staying abroad increased with ages.