China’s eastern universities told not to poach from lagging regions

The Chinese government has ordered universities in the east of the country not to use talent funding to poach academics from the nation’s midwest and north east, to avoid worsening an internal brain drain.

The Ministry of Education and the Ministry of Finance sought to offer some encouragement of university autonomy in funding management in a notice, but said talent funding “must not be used by institutions in the east”, where cities such as Beijing and Shanghai are located, “to bring in talents from the midwest and north east regions”.

Previously, in the 2017 version of the notice, institutions were “not encouraged” to do so. The tone became stricter in a 2019 central government missive on promoting science, which aimed to “support the central and western regions to stabilise their talent building”.

“It is difficult to really stop the mobility of talents, because most people want to work or live in ‘better’ cities or colleges and universities,” Zhang Youliang, associate professor at the Institute of Higher Education at Beijing University of Technology, told Times Higher Education.

A 2018 study examined career mobility among 3,234 junior academics, based on data from the National Science Fund for Distinguished Young Scholars (DYS) between 1994 and 2014. It found that 405 academics proactively changed their workplaces. The provinces of Shaanxi, Jilin, Gansu, Liaoning, Fujian and Anhui (mostly in the midwest and north east) lost more DYS scholars than they brought in.

The authors wrote that the “talent crisis” in the north west and the north east was caused by a “serious talent deficit and insufficient attraction for high-level talents, rather than the scale of outflow”.

They concluded that boosting resources for regions suffering outflow would be the best measure in response, and that “hindering” mobility “is not in accordance with the market logic and not beneficial to innovation”.

“There are many factors affecting the mobility of talents, including natural environment, society, economy, and colleges and universities,” Dr Zhang said. “It is difficult for colleges and universities to change the external environment, but they can optimise [their] internal environment.”

Family is another important consideration, he added, and some academics may feel that their children “can obtain better educational opportunities in eastern cities”.

However, Liu Wan-Hsin, a senior researcher at the Kiel Institute for the World Economy, said the impact of the new policy “would very likely be different from what the government expected”.

“Young talents may not want to go to the less developed regions first, since they are worrying that their future career development back to the east region may be restricted,” she said.

“A better way might be to give universities in the less developed regions more resources for them to compensate for their competition disadvantages.

“Further policies to help improve the business and economic environments on-site and to strengthen their international business and academic connections are also necessary.”

karen.liu@timeshighereducation.com