Locational preferences of high-level overseas talent returning to China: Evidence from microdata analysis

While Chinese national and local governments have made every effort to attract high-level overseas talent, limited scholarly attention has been paid to their decision of where to stay in China. Using resume data of 3372 individuals involved in the "Thousand Talent Program", this study makes the first attempt to identify both regional and personal factors that affect locational choices of overseas talent in China. Descriptive results show that returned talent are unevenly distributed and are mostly concentrated in a few coastal provinces. Results from conditional logit models show that both academic career prospects and (natural and man-made) amenities play an important role in shaping overseas talent's choices of where to work, but regional prosperity exerts no effect. Alumni social networks, scientific collaboration networks, and educational trajectories are found to greatly influence their locational choices. Results from mixed models suggest that the effect of these provincial factors may vary by age, time spent abroad, the type of talent, the location of undergraduate study, and the country of stay before return. This study enhances our knowledge of the international return migration of the highly skilled by focusing on state-led academic migration and by challenging the conventional wisdom that high-level global talent are rootless and cosmopolitan elites with similar locational preferences.