Teaching Comparative Government and Politics

Tuesday, November 06, 2012

Brain drain

Developing nations worry about citizens who go abroad for educations and don't return. Should China worry about the emigration of successful middle class citizens? Will this tiny trend affect politics?

Wary of Future, Professionals Leave China in Record Numbers

As China’s Communist Party prepares a momentous leadership change in early November, it is losing skilled professionals… in record numbers. In 2010, the last year for which complete statistics are available, 508,000 Chinese left for the 34 developed countries that make up the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. That is a 45 percent increase over 2000…

Few emigrants from China cite politics, but it underlies many of their concerns. They talk about a development-at-all-costs strategy that has ruined the environment, as well as a deteriorating social and moral fabric that makes China feel like a chillier place than when they were growing up. Over all, there is a sense that despite all the gains in recent decades, China’s political and social trajectory is still highly uncertain…

“There continues to be a lot of uncertainty and risk, even at the highest level… ” said Liang Zai, a migration expert at the University at Albany. “People wonder what’s going to happen two, three years down the road.”

The sense of uncertainty affects poorer Chinese, too… Even though hundreds of millions of Chinese have been lifted from poverty during this period, the rich-poor gap in China is among the world’s widest and the economy is increasingly dominated by large corporations, many of them state-run…

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Labels: China, demographics, economics, politics