Getting personal

02/25/2003
China Daily

The first generation of Chinese students to be educated abroad in the 19th century might be jealous of their successors today - such as Wen Ruifeng, a returnee from the United States and co-founder of a Hong Kong-listed software firm in Beijing.

"I went abroad in the early 1990s when there was little opportunity for personal development at home, but I came back because I saw so many chances here," he says flatly when asked why he decided to move overseas and then came back again.

In contrast, his predecessors, like Zhan Tianyou (1861-1919), dubbed as the father of China's railways, could scarcely dream about anything as advanced as "personal development".

When Zhan Tianyou returned with a bachelor's degree in civil engineering from Yale in 1881, he found it impossible to apply what he had learned, even though he and his peers had been sent abroad by the government of the Qing Dynasty (1644-1911). Not until seven years had passed did Zhan find work as a railway engineer through a friend's recommendation. Even so, his expertise was never fully utilized because railway construction in China was controlled by western powers during his lifetime.

Xue Lan, a professor of public management at Tsinghua University, says the fact that more returning Chinese intellectuals can declare they have come back seeking personal development and fulfilment reflects the social progress of China.

"Back when the nation was suffering from foreign oppression and struggling for survival, personal development was simply out of the question," Xue says.

But today returned intellectuals enjoy a very different environment, he says. "The country's current state of economic development offers golden opportunities for people pursuing personal goals and society has also begun to pay more respect to personal development."

Wen Ruifeng went to Japan in 1990 when the economic research programme he was involved in was shelved due to a policy shift. So he left the country and landed a job with a Japanese investment management firm.

Despite a handsome salary, Wen says he was always been aware of the glass ceiling for non-Japanese workers in the country. Then he moved to the United States in 1997 to pursue a master's degree at the Darden Graduate School of Business Administration.

Wen says he enjoyed his life in the States. Nevertheless, he headed back to China in 2000.

"I can probably earn the same amount of money at home, but the fresh air, the lack of traffic problems and the pleasant green belts you see wherever you go in the US are often missing in China," he observed. "But I gave up all of these benefits because the chance for personal development was so attractive - I could not resist it."

China's rapid economic development and shift to a market economy "mean chances for us to start our own businesses and compete successfully," Wen says.

Li Junwei, a schoolmate of Wen's at Darden, set up a management consulting firm in Beijing last October, 10 months after he returned to China. Before that he worked for an investment consulting service, where he met many investors and sensed opportunity ripening as small and medium-sized enterprises began to mushroom throughout the country.

"These enterprises, either State-owned or private, are in great need of consulting services regarding investment and management, but big consulting firms like McKinsey are too expensive for them. That is where our business opportunities exist," he says.

Li also targets small foreign enterprises in China. He says he believes China's entry to the World Trade Organization will bring in more foreign businesses and more clients for his consulting firm.

Before deciding to go back to China, Wen Ruifeng says a would-be returnee needs to weigh the desire for spiritual satisfaction against that for material contentment. "You have to know what you want most - a comfortable lifestyle or further personal development?"

According to a survey by the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences (CASS), most returned Chinese intellectuals have come back for reasons of personal development.

"Living conditions in China still do not compare with those of developed countries, but the people who have returned value the momentum of the country's development more than anything else," says Wang Zhenyu, a CASS sociologist who conducted the survey.

Wang recalls a couple she interviewed who had returned from Japan to Dalian, a coastal city in Northeast China's Liaoning Province. They were living in a two-room apartment with their child and the wife's mother when the survey was conducted in 1996. But the couple said they had no regrets as long as the university they worked for could provide the equipment and facilities necessary to allow them to conduct their research.

Yu Kongjian, who holds a Harvard doctorate in landscape design, came back in 1997. He says he has done very well since his return. His talent has been recognized, and his unique design for a park built on a deserted dockyard in Zhongshan, Guangdong Province won a prize from the American Society of Landscape Architects last year.

Now a professor at Peking University, Yu has also set up his own landscape design institute. He says he decided to come back when he saw the upsurge in urban construction in China. His institute has taken commissions for some 100 projects, including industrial parks in Beijing, streets in Tibet, a square in Dujiangyan in Sichuan Province, and even tourism sites in Indonesia and America.

But what Yu cares most about is realizing his design ideals. During the high tide of urban construction in China, he observes, "some money-driven developers show no respect for landscape and environment, and many designers or planners copy American or European styles blindly, with few of those in decision-making positions understanding what is at stake."

Consequently, he says, "you see identical shining high-rise structures all over the country which ignore national identity, both in landscape and in architecture."

Despite his limited impact, Yu says he is trying his best to change the situation with his landscape design concepts, which he says are centred on a respect for and intimacy with the soil, or in a broader sense, with nature.

He says he always carries with him a packet of soil his mother gave him when he left his hometown in Zhejiang Province in the early 1980s to pursue a higher education in Beijing. It even accompanied him to Harvard in 1995.

The packet of soil, he says, played a pivotal role when he was considering whether or not to come back. "Only then did I realize what the soil of my homeland meant to me."

Yu's understanding of the Chinese attachment to one's homeland recently won him the bid for a renovation project in Boston's Chinatown. His design of a well for the community - into which Chinese people can pour soil they have brought from their homeland, as a symbol of homeland gnomes moving together with them to their new dwellings - not only touched Chinese people residing there, but also the American panel members.

China began to expand its educational exchanges with west

ern countries in the late 1970s, but witnessed what some termed a "brain drain" in the ensuing years. In the two decades that followed the expansion, over 400,000 Chinese went abroad to study, but only 130,000 of them returned. The tide seemed to reverse in the mid-1990s, however. According to official statistics, the number of returnees has increased by an average of 13 per cent every year since 1998.

David Zweig, an American researcher of China studies, observes in his research report on China's brain drain that the desire Chinese intellectuals living in America felt to return was not conditioned by the difficulty or ease of living abroad but instead by their home country's strategies for attracting them back.

China launched a national fund amounting to 400 million yuan (US$48.2 million) in 1990 for returning professionals, allowing them to conduct research in their given fields. By June 2002, 20,000 returnees had received financial support from the fund. Nationwide, over 50 industrial parks have been built to accommodate returnees, parks which are now home to more than 1,300 enterprises. A variety of preferential local policies have also been adopted so that returnees can set up their own businesses.

A Washington Post article observed that "the pendulum has begun to swing back". "China's massive brain drain has become a small brain gain." In 2002, 18,000 Chinese scholars returned home from overseas to work, nearly double the previous year's figure.

According to the Ministry of Education, 81 per cent of academicians at the Chinese Academy of Sciences, 58 per cent of the mentors to doctoral candidates in the age group of 45 years and older, and 51 per cent of the leaders of Chinese higher learning institutions are returnees.

Wang Nanlin, who holds a master's degree from Tsinghua University and is enrolled in the PhD programme in the materials science department at Iowa State University, says people return home for various reasons.

"We always pursue that which is best for us. Going back is not a bad alternative because today's China is a very good place to foster personal development."