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Chinese Returnees
Accuracy in Academia ^ | April 23, 2010 | Bethany Stotts

Posted on 04/23/2010 8:23:49 AM PDT by bs9021

Chinese Returnees

Bethany Stotts, April 23, 2010

Speakers at a recent Brookings Institution forum on Chinese returnees debated the impact that study abroad experiences will have on China’s political and social development. Around 1.6 million Chinese citizens have studied abroad or finished a fellowship at least a year in duration since 1978, said the panelists. About a half million have since returned, said Cheng Li, Director of Research at Brookings’ John L. Thornton China Center, citing data from the Chinese Embassy.

“Those who study for four months or half a year are not counted” in this analysis, he noted, according to the official transcript (pdf). “And there are a lot of them. Probably several million sent over the past three decades.”

Li recently compared the number of returnees included in the 16th and 17th Central Committee meetings for the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), who composed 6.2% of 16th Committee members, including alternates, and 10.5% of 17th Committee members and their alternates. “Now, in two years China will have another important meeting, the so-called 18th Party Congress,” said Li. “My projection is somewhere between 15 to 17 percent.”

Hong Kong University professor David Zweig challenged this assumption, noting that “…in social science, definitions matter.” “And Li Cheng uses visiting scholars one year abroad as a visiting scholar, as a returnee,” he added.

“In most of my work I’ve set aside the visiting scholar who has been overseas for one year,” he said, continuing, “Many of those people went—let’s say in the ’80s, went to an American university, never contacted the United States at all. They sat in a laboratory, didn’t know what was going on very much around… And if we’re looking at real changes in values, then I think you’ve got to be talking about people who get degrees.”...

(Excerpt) Read more at academia.org ...


TOPICS: Business/Economy; Education; Society; Travel
KEYWORDS: brookings; china; education; foreignstudents

1 posted on 04/23/2010 8:23:49 AM PDT by bs9021
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