A SURE SIGN OF A HIGHER EDUCATION sector that is still in its developmental stage is a brain drain of young researchers to Western universities. For many years, this has been China’s experience, even as it spends huge amounts of money on its goal of becoming a “powerhouse of higher education” by 2050. But now, efforts to stem the loss of talented academics are paying off, according to the president of China’s major science funding agency.

“Just ten years ago, the flow of talent was at about seven Chinese students leaving for every one that came back. Now its six (students) returning in every seven”, says Wei Yang, president of the National Natural Science Foundation of China (NSFC). The brain drain is almost over.

Prof. Yang attributes this improvement to a rise in the number of scientists coming from abroad to work in China, but also to the growth of China’s youth population, and improvements in domestic universities. “We get more and more Ph D students coming every year — about 70,000 — so there’s a big talent pool”, he says.

China’s investment in higher education shows no sign of abating as it looks to build a modern knowledge economy. Mainland China is now the joint sixth most-represented nation in the Top 200 of the Times Higher Education World University Rankings, with Peking and Tsinghua universities in the Top 30. The country’s latest excellence initiative, ‘Double First Class’, looks to achieve ‘world-class’ status for 42 universities by the middle of the century.

China’s strategy focuses heavily on science and engineering subjects, and NSFCs budget has increased from 18 million yuan (Rs.18.4 crore) at its founding in 1986, to 28.6 billion yuan (Rs.29,360 crore) last year — equivalent to more than 30 percent of the government of India’s total budgeted expenditure on education in 2018-19.

Yang says “that his funding agency is now looking to recruit from abroad just to keep on top of the growing burden of administering these funds. We have only 230 staff for the whole of NSFC and every year we have to handle 200,000 grant applications”, he says.

With a career spanning 30 years, Prof. Yang, an internationally acclaimed engineer and materials science researcher, says he had nonetheless come across several “surprises” during his five years as leader of the funding body. “The first is that over the past five years, the people who get grants are so much younger than before”, he says.

The second surprise, he continues, is the “increase in international collaboration with all countries”. Each year, the NSFC earmarks 1.1 billion yuan (Rs.1,129 crore) for international cooperation and research exchange programmes — an eightfold increase in ten years, helping to bring China in line with US, European and south-east Asian competitors. As a result, China now ranks #2 in the world for output of internationally collaborated papers.