China's Talent Policy towards Overseas Returnee Entrepreneurs: Origin, Trends and Impact

he notion of "brain drain" seems gradually reversed to "brain circulation" (Saxenian, 2000, Saxenian, 2005) or even "brain gain" (Pan, 2011) in some developing nations. One example is China, which has been the largest international students sending country for over a decade, has now started to regain brain power through design and implementation of policies to attract overseas students to work or start up new ventures in their home country. This paper focuses on Chinese government's policies towards returnee entrepreneurs whose critical role of transferring much needed technology know-how in strengthening the country's innovation capacity have been widely reorganised as key strategic assets by the Chinese government. A set of policies have been developed and evolved over the last decade to promote such type of entrepreneurship. This study traces the origin and development of those policies and summarises the major policy measures that have been introduced at both national and local levels. An initial assessment of the impact of those policies shows the policies are successful in terms of creating awareness among Chinese overseas and they also work well in certain industries and certain cities, but the policies reside on the premises that those who can benefit from such favourable policies need to be verified and approved by government and their businesses also need to be in so-called "strategically important" sectors. The policies' highly selective nature means a large number of returnee entrepreneurs are excluded from benefiting from those policies and this also further fuel the debate whether the state should be using policy tools to deliberately favour certain types of entrepreneurs in certain sectors than others.