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Title: Brain Drain, Brain Gain and Brain Circulation: Emerging Trends and Patterns of Chinese Transnational Talent Mobility in a Global World
Abstract:
This paper examines the changing nature of education in the age of transnational mobility between China and the globalized world. It maps the emerging trends and patterns of transnational talent mobilities as part of the overall world trend of increasing transnational migration and international student mobility. A rising China with its economic boom created the economic conditions for the mobility of Chinese people particularly to OECD countries. Guided by a transnationalism framework, we explore how education has to be rethought in the context of transnational mobility as a multidirectional process where diverse identities, forms of attachment and belonging inscribe the experiences of people as they move across geographical, cultural, national, and linguistic boundaries.
In recent decades there has been a growing literature that explores transnational talent mobility utilizing the transnational migration and transnationalism perspective. It seems clear that the shifting paradigm of transnationalism has challenged the rigid, territorial nationalism, the understanding of borders and national identities. It is making cultural boundaries and identities porous, hybrid, and dialogic. The concept of transnationalism, in contradistinction to the bounded imaginaries of nationhood, provides with a framework that posits a significant shift in the understanding of borders and national identities, thereby raising contentious questions about cohesiveness of “host” societies, identitive solidarity, and orthodox assimilation theories (Vertovec, 2004).
The rise of China and the changing demographic and social characteristics of the Chinese diasporas over the past century, particularly in terms of socio-economic status, reveal the need to develop new frameworks to better understand Chinese transnational talent mobility. China’s relaxation of its exit control policies from the mid-1980s onward prompted a massive increase in emigration (Xiang, 2016a). By the mid-1990s the liberalization of visa policies at home and abroad enabled Chinese citizens, particularly highly skilled and wealthy Chinese migrants, to enjoy ever-greater freedom in permanent settlement and back-and-forth transnational mobilities. As a result, China entered an emigration phase of brain drain around the beginning of the new millennium. At the same time, China’s economic boom created conditions for the return of many highly educated talent from OECD countries. Its favorable government policies and attitudes towards returnees and their expertise mobilized many expats to relocate to China to work and live. These policies have achieved a measure of success in ‘brain gain’. Unlike earlier movements and mobilities, the latest ones are more dynamic and fluid depicting unending sojourn across transnational spaces. This brain circulation involves high degrees of mobility and transnationality amongst Chinese diasporan communities in Europe and beyond (Latham & Wu 2013, p.10). In this view, China’s policies have managed to reverse the brain drain and transform it into ‘brain circulation’, consistent with what Saxenian (2005) spoke of in terms of maintaining social and professional ties in OECD countries and also being engaged in simultaneity in transnational social mobilities. This paper therefore examines how education needs to be rethought in the changing context of transnational mobility between China and the globalized world.
