The number of China’s returnees will decrease in 2014

Recently a lot of Chinese newspapers have been talking about how China now is attracting more and more Chinese students who have studied abroad and chose to return to China. Some observers believe this is because China is becoming more and more appealing than before. Many Chinese give up opportunities to work abroad and come home. It is said that in 2013, over 350,000 Chinese came back to China after studying abroad, which is 30% higher than 2012. Perhaps this means about 110,000 more Chinese chose to come back.

However, if we look closer at why those Chinese preferred to come back to China in 2013, from the UK’s perspective alone, we could tell that there were at least 100,000 Chinese who had no other choice but to return to China. As in 2012, the UK government canceled the Post Study Work visa, and those 100,000 students who came to the UK to study in 2012 have mostly have been forced leave the country. I know most of my own students tried to stay but failed. In my observation, less than 5% of those students stayed, as they happened to find high salary work, or opportunity for further study.

However, I disagree with some of what the press predicted, that in 2014, the number of returnees will keep increasing. I think the number will, in fact, decrease in 2014, as the UK government will issue a new policy that allows a student who finds an internship the opportunity to stay for one year. It’s comparably easier to attain this type of visa, which does not require a company to sponsor the person and pay a high salary. I anticipated that, for those students who came to the UK in 2013, 50% of them can stay, and this will result in the overall return number of students.

Sadly, though China is becoming more and more attractive, I do not think this would have too much affect on the number of people who take the initiative to come home, unless they are forced to do so. From a simple invest and return formula, students who have spent the equivalent of 200,000RMB per year to study abroad may want a job that can offer a return which equals or is at least close to this value. However, such jobs can hardly be found in China. When forecasting the number of returnees, it would make more sense to observe the visa policies in the foreign countries, rather than purely look at the statistics.

The author is the Senior Lecturer and Associate Professor at University of East Anglia.