Startup park making impact on the country’s brain drain (2)

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Because it has more graduates returning from abroad than most other places on the Chinese mainland, Xi’an began to build its own startup park as early as 1998.

“We were not the earliest,” Yan said. “But we were fairly early and have remained fairly focused.”

Building startup parks became a national program only later. It was in 2001 that Ministry of Human Resources and Social Security began to work with a number of city governments to develop the concept. Of the chosen cities, most were either on or not far from the coast, and landlocked Xi’an was one of the few exceptions.

Chinese media quoted Dai Zhengming, an official from the Ministry of Education, as saying in 2006 that of all the intended startup incubators, only a few showed enough entrepreneurial potential to live up to the central government’s expectations.

Xi'an was the only inland city that he mentioned.

In 2010 and 2011, China began to see a big wave of returning professionals.

Nationwide, the number of startup parks rose to 160 and they host a combined total of 8,000 companies and 20,000 individuals with overseas graduate degrees.

Of those companies, close to 450 were based in Xi’an, and 30 of them were making 10 million yuan ($ 1.63 million) or more sales in a year.

According to the most recent report in 2013, the total number of private business opened by returnees in the Xi’an startup park has risen to more than 800.

Ministry of Human Resources and Social Security claims that in the last five years, as many as some 800,000 overseas-educated scholars and professionals have returned to China for work.

This figure is nearly three times the number of graduates persuaded to return in the preceding three decades.

In spite of the success of these measures, there is still much work to be done.

A report by Ministry of Education found that only one in 10 returned graduates holds a doctorate, and it concluded that it is still difficult to entice the most elite talent to return.

China’s 12th Five-Year Plan (2011-15) also has a section about recruiting talents from abroad, predicting that during the period, an additional 500,000 former graduate students will return to China. The park’s administration will take the national Five-Year Plan as their guideline for recruiting more inhabitants of the Xi’an “pioneering park”.

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