The latest statistics show Shanghai has lured more than 56,000 overseas Chinese students to go back home for work since China's reform and opening up to the outside world. They have set up more than 3,000 enterprises with a total investment exceeding 430 million US dollars.

Their returning trend has been obvious with each passing day. Nearly 7,000 overseas Chinese students have swarmed back into Shanghai since the Shanghai Municipal Personnel Bureau launched the project that hopes to attract more than 10,000 overseas Chinese students in the next three years starting from August 31, 2003, said Mao Dali, deputy director of the bureau. According to the current tendency, Shanghai is expected to reach the project goal by the end of this year, half a year ahead of the schedule.

The nearly 7,000 returnees feature high academic qualifications. Of them, 69 per cent have degrees above master's ones, including 22 per cent with doctorates. Their age make-up is becoming younger in average, and most of them are aged from 25 to 30. In the past, the returnees were mainly from the United States and Japan; and in the recent years, Britain has replaced the US, becoming the biggest nation to "export" professionals. The number coming back from countries including Germany, Australia, New Zealand and Canada, is going up.

With the appearance of backflow tide, how to find jobs at home smoothly is becoming the problem the returned overseas students are concerned about most. For this, the units including the personnel bureau held 2005 Shanghai Overseas Professionals Recruiting Fair on June 25 and nearly 40 transnational corporations, large and medium-sized foreign-funded enterprises offer more 400 job vacancies for returned overseas talents. The number of 56,000 overseas professionals only makes up a small proportion of the urban population in Shanghai. In the future, Shanghai will go on to welcome overseas students back, and at the same time, special attention will be paid to absorbing more high-level overseas students, said Mao Dali, who is specially in charge of the Shanghai Overseas Recruitment work.

By People's Daily Online