[MUSIC] Now to show you that the leadership has actually maintained a very strong stress on this policy over so many years, let's go through the political history of the, let's go through the policy history here. So what we see first is Deng Xiaoping way back in spring of 1978, even before the reforms really began, and he made statements like backwardness must be recognized before it can be changed. One must learn from those who are most advanced before one can catch up and surpass them. So clearly, we can see he wants to catch up and surpass them, but already he's saying we have to do this. In June 1978, he criticized the Ministry of Education, saying policy on overseas students was to inflexible. And in August 1979, Deng proposes that China should send 10,000 students a year overseas. But here we see this conservatism by the Ministry of Education and they cut the quota back to 3,000 a year for five years. Now beginning in 1984 and 1985, two leading reformers, Zhao Ziyang, who's then the Prime Minister, and Hu Yaobang, who's the General Secretary of the Communist party. They introduce major educational reforms. And one of the things they do is they decentralize authority over the exchanges that Chinese universities have with overseas universities. And so these bilateral exchanges then become important channels for students to get out. Students are also able to apply directly for overseas study and scholarships and if they can get a fellowship from abroad they're allowed to go. To encourage people to come back in the same period of time, the National Natural Science Foundation is established, which becomes the major source of competitive funding for returning scientists. Zhao then also plays a very important role in 1987. By that time, people are starting not to come back. And the data in 1987 showed that among those people who were paying for their own way, 3% of them were coming back. 97% of them weren't coming back. And so the leadership of the Ministry of Education got very upset, and it triggered this debate within the government and within the party. Now, the Ministry of Education, which at this time was called the State Education Commission, they wanted to just cut back or cancel programs, because they were being criticized for that. The State Science and Technology Commission, which is sort of the equivalent of the Ministry of Science, they were very positive about people staying longer, because the longer that people stayed overseas the more access they could get to foreign technologies. And that was good for China. The Ministry of Personnel, they looked at these people coming back, and they said, whoa, where are we going to find them jobs? Maybe we can't find them appropriate jobs, so maybe we need to send out fewer people, but Zhao, at that point, spoke out strongly and put forward this concept of what's called storing brain power overseas. Maybe it's justifying the policy, but in many ways it's an early recognition of what in the 2000s would be seen within the scholarly literature, what's called brain circulation. People go out and even if they don't return right away and stay abroad for a number of years, they may send back information and technology, or visit their home country sharing ideas and eventually they may even return. Now, unfortunately for China, in terms of the flow of people back and forth, the Tiananmen event in June 4th, 1989, really triggers, creates an instant diaspora and an instant brain drain. And this figure really shows how one single event here in Tiananmen in 1989, can trigger in a massive number of people to stay abroad, so this compares China, Taiwanese, and Indians in terms of their flows, getting degrees, people trying to stay overseas through getting a degree. And you can see here that while the pattern was sort of similar, China was already coming up a bit. Here, after Tiananmen, the number of people trying to get degrees just goes through the roof.
