Intellectual migration: considering China

ABSTRACT

The ‘global race for talent’ has drawn immense attention from academics, policy-makers and the media. China is on both sides of the race. On the one hand, rapid economic growth has created the opportunity for many affluent and middle-class families to send their children abroad for higher education while stimulating intense internal migration for education and/or career opportunities. On the other hand, to affirm its (re-)emergence as an economic giant, China has begun recruiting talent from abroad, gradually forsaking its traditional role as a brain-drain country to become an exemplar of brain circulation. This paper elaborates an ‘intellectual migration’ conceptual framework that asserts both higher-education and highly skilled migration is a dynamic process that occurs along a spectrum where migration stages intersect with life transitions. Arguing that intellectual migration should be analysed as a continuum, we provide evidence from our own empirical work and the literature to ascertain its relevancy and applicability to China at this juncture and suggest a more integrative approach to analysing the framework.

KEYWORDS:

• Intellectual migration
• intellectual node
• intellectual gateway
• intellectual periphery
• intellectual capital
• China

Acknowledgement

The opinions expressed are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the funding agencies. We thank Drs. Wan Yu and Shengnan Zhao, and Miss Xiaojie Li for their contribution to the early stage of the project, and appreciate the comments from participants at a workshop in Guangzhou.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

A National Science Foundation grant (BCS-1660526), a Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada grant (435-2017-1168), and a National Natural Science Foundation of China grant (71742004) partially funded the research project that this article is based upon.