China’s Young Thousand Talents fails to attract ‘top’ scientists

China’s most prominent talent recruitment programme is still failing to lure “top” global scientists back to the country, a study has found.

Established in 2010 as a key pillar of Beijing’s Thousand Talents Programme, the Young Thousand Talents (YTT) initiative seeks to recruit science and technology experts from abroad, especially among Chinese expatriates.

In the West, the initiative has come under scrutiny from lawmakers, who fear espionage and intellectual property theft amid rising geopolitical tensions. But research suggests that YTT is not yet attracting the cream of the crop.

“Although designed to improve China’s prospect of becoming a global STEM leader, the programme’s effectiveness in attracting top talents and nurturing their productivity is unclear,” write academics in the journal Science.

Yanbo Wang, an associate professor at the University of Hong Kong’s business school, and Dongbo Shi, an assistant professor at Shanghai Jiao Tong University, examined researchers’ motives for turning down the award, which includes a one-off, tax-exempt income subsidy of 500,000 yuan (£60,600) and start-up grants of 1 million yuan to 3 million yuan.

Dr Wang and his colleague surveyed more than 400 researchers who were approached for the programme’s first four cohorts starting in 2011. They included 73 scientists who rejected the YTT offers and remained overseas and 339 who accepted spots in China via the programme and spent at least five years doing research there.

While the programme attracted high-calibre talent, it failed to draw the star researchers China hopes to entice, the researchers found.

At the time they received the offer, YTT “rejectors” were more productive relative to the “acceptors”, with an average of 2.93 publications per year versus 2.39 per year among the YTT participants. They were also more likely to have overseas faculty appointments, with 89 per cent of rejectors holding posts versus 14 per cent of acceptors.

Those who turned down YTT offers had larger annual research grants abroad – with an average of £25,300 compared with their peers’ £3,700.

“For the very best researchers who have opportunities to receive funding and build up their own research programmes overseas, the YTT programme was much less attractive than [it was] to researchers who had the capability but not the funding to pursue independent research overseas,” Dr Wang told Times Higher Education.

The findings also suggest that, once they returned home, some YTT scientists struggled to “reintegrate into China’s academia”, causing their research output to slow down.

Once funding and team size were controlled for, YTT scientists “barely outperformed [overseas counterparts] in terms of publications”, according to the study.

But Dr Wang did not believe that the finding boded ill for the programme.

“Instead, this finding suggests that the effectiveness of the YTT programme reflects both the merits [and] strength of China’s talent recruitment initiations as well as the weakness [and] structural problems in the current scientific funding schemes in the US and the EU,” he said.

pola.lem@timeshighereducation.com