Overseas Chinese Researchers Going Home

"When I left China to study abroad, I thought I had left China for good,"
says neuroscientist Shigang He. Yet, after earning his Ph.D. and landing a
permanent research position in Australia, He started having second thoughts.
A visit to a Chinese institute astounded him. Labs were bulging with new
equipment and feverish with activity. And funding for individual researchers
was nearly on a par with his in Australia. He made several trips back to
China, he says, "to make sure I wasn't deluded." Then he did something once
unthinkable for a Chinese scientist established abroad: He resigned from the
University of Queensland, sold his house in Brisbane, and joined the
Institute of Neuroscience in Shanghai, a part of the Chinese Academy of
Sciences (CAS).

He's not alone. Although numbers are hard to come by, repatriated scientists
are multiplying. Officials at the Institute of Health Sciences, a part of
CAS's Shanghai Institutes for Biological Sciences (SIBS), say a third of the
two dozen primary investigators who have joined the institute since its
founding four years ago had given up permanent jobs overseas. "It is
definitely a new trend, not only at SIBS but throughout China," says SIBS
President Gang Pei.

Those returning to their roots say the trend indicates how far Chinese
science has come in catching up with the West. "It is no longer true that a
faculty position in China is less competitive than one in the U.S.," asserts
Jianmin Zhou, a molecular plant biologist who left an associate
professorship at Kansas State University, Manhattan, for a position at the
National Institute of Biological Sciences in Beijing. In China, midcareer
returnees bridge a gap between young scientists trained abroad and
high-profile veterans who spend a few months a year in China as advisers.
"These midcareer people help China" with their experience and administrative
skills, says Pei.

http://chinadigitaltimes.net/2007/04...e _a_re_1.php
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