Startup park making impact on the country's brain drain

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Startup park making impact on the country's brain drain

By ED ZHANG (People's Daily Online) 13:31, September 06, 2013

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As a cultural hub, Xi’an attracts tourists from home and abroad to see its terracotta soldiers built in 200BC to guard China’s first emperor in the afterlife. The city is now home to a large number of overseas returnees.(Photo/ ED ZHANG)

Yan Ling is proud of her work as an administrator running one of the premier parks for technology startups in Xi'an, a city in China's interior.

She sees herself as a "high-end community service worker.

But she is also the embodiment of a national campaign.

In the last few years, China has systematically worked to attract Chinese graduates from western universities to return with the lure of aid to private startups granted by startup parks like the one Yan helps running.

As an added bonus, they are free to choose the place where local conditions are best suited to their needs.

In what some are calling one of the most innovative social experiments in this country, special policies in terms of public administration and finance are being put in place to promote the development of private enterprises.

Private enterprises targeted for aid will be those on which the central government places the highest priority, such as advanced technologies and companies that have the potential to raise the country’s overall productivity. From the 1980s to 2011, a total of 2.24 million Chinese adults left the country for academic programs overseas. The past few years have seen growing numbers of Chinese return thanks in part to government efforts.

By the end of 2011, some 800,000 had returned to China, though some no longer held a Chinese passport.

That year, the number grew by more than 180,000, about 33 percent more than 2010, according to figures given by Ministry of Human Resources and Social Security.

In 2010, there were 135,000 men and women who returned from overseas educational programs, up nearly 25 percent from one year earlier, the ministry reported.

Of all the steps the government has taken to attract elite talent, the most noticeable is perhaps the 1,000 Talents Program, which set a target of persuading top researchers and engineers to return to China annually.

By the end of 2011, 2,200 individuals had been recruited through the program. After returning to their motherland, many of the professionals took up work in State-owned universities and research institutes.

There are also enterprising individuals who prefer to run their own companies.

These usually gravitate to the high-tech development zones being built or already operational near all the major cities.

Through coordination among a number of government ministries, arrangements are made so that most new industrial areas usually contain a section reserved for startups by people who have returned from studying abroad, which is called “pioneering park for overseas returnees” in China.