COLUMN ONE : China Tries to Lure Its Best Home : Many students who flock to overseas colleges don’t return. Now Beijing is willing to pay up to regain some of its lost brainpower.

When Chen Zhangliang finished work for his Ph. D. in biotechnology at Washington University in St. Louis, a number of highly impressed American companies stepped forward with handsome job offers.

But Chen, 33, son of illiterate peasants in Fujian province, chose to return to his native China for a fraction of the salary he could have earned as a research scientist in the West.

After studying at one of Italy’s renowned musical instrument academies, Zheng Quan, 45, won recognition in international competitions as one of the most promising young violin makers in the world.

But instead of taking a job in Europe or Japan that would have guaranteed him at least $60,000 a year, he moved back to Beijing to teach at the local music institute for a paltry $125 a month.

The two men are among the more than 230,000 students--China’s best, brightest and most politically connected--who have flooded foreign universities since this country was opened to the West in 1978.

What makes Chen and Zheng different is that they came back. The government hopes they are the pilot fish--the first among many thousands who ultimately will return to serve the motherland.

Much of China’s future, in fact, hinges on the repatriation of what former Premier Zhao Ziyang once called “our stored brainpower overseas.” Without the graduates, China’s ability to compete on the global market in science and technology will be seriously undermined.

The Chinese, though, are conducting a quiet, powerful campaign to bring their talents home from campuses around the world, few of which are without their share of high-achieving students from the mainland.

Official Chinese sources report that since 1978, only 70,000 of the students sent overseas--roughly one of three--have returned home. Experts say the return rate from the United States is even lower--between 5% and 10%.

After the 1989 army crackdown on demonstrating students in Tian An Men Square, the homeward flow decreased to a trickle. Only recently has the rate picked up.

Ironically, one of the surprising reasons for the increase is an American law originally designed to provide haven for students in the United States.

Congress, in the emotional aftermath of Tian An Men Square, granted permanent-resident green cards to Chinese students studying in America before 1990. The impact of the Chinese Student Protection Act became evident this summer when the Immigration and Naturalization Service formally granted cards to 49,000 of the 53,000 students who applied.

But instead of remaining in the United States, many of the students surprised immigration officials by rushing back to China. “The very day their green card was approved,” said one official, “they bought an airplane ticket home to visit Grandma, Mom and Dad or, in some cases, get a job.”

The coveted document only enhanced the students’ attractiveness as employees for Chinese companies, especially those that do business with the United States. Recognizing the potential of this summer’s green-card phenomenon, the Chinese government in November unveiled a policy encouraging even “short visits” by its lost tribe of overseas students.

“The vast numbers of personnel studying abroad, especially the young, are human resources who will span this century and the next. They are our country’s valuable treasures,” Dai Guangqian, an official with the Ministry of Personnel, said in an interview published in the People’s Daily newspaper.

One of the new policy’s main attractions is that it offers qualified students air tickets to China and matches them with jobs in government research facilities. In effect, China is giving research grants for its own citizens to return home.

This is only one of dozens of programs and incentives offered by the central and local governments to bring back the students.

Every year, delegations of Chinese officials, much like large corporations on recruiting trips, travel to American campuses to meet with Chinese students. In a remarkably soft-sell approach--no threatening or haranguing about patriotic duty--they talk of the opportunities back home and, most important, note that students will be allowed to leave China if they are not happy once they return.

“They have to make people feel confident that once they come back, they can still get out,” said David Zweig, a professor at Tufts University Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy, who has conducted several studies of the overseas students.

Jiang Qinguo, 37, who graduated with a master’s degree in fine arts from Columbia University and then from the University of California’s Hastings Law School, recently returned to his native Shanghai to set up a business. “For most people to even think about coming back they need this guarantee of freedom to travel,” he said. “In this respect, the Chinese government has been pretty enlightened.”

Still, in a recent survey of 273 Chinese students in the United States and Canada, Zweig found that more than half “did not trust that the Chinese government would keep its word about allowing people who returned to go out of China in the future.”

In hopes of luring some of the overseas brainpower in its direction, the ancient Chinese capital of Nanjing built an industrial park offering preferential tax conditions, customs procedures and land prices for returning students interested in starting businesses.

Preferential policies for returning students were also adopted in Fujian and Jiangsu provinces, Shanghai and even remote Inner Mongolia.

Shanghai, the East Coast business capital, encourages returning students to start up private firms. The city government issued a circular aimed at all overseas students: “No Matter Where You Come From, You’re All Welcome to Work In Shanghai.”

Sometimes the bidding wars for prized returnees bring offers that are attractive even by Western standards.

Chen Zhangliang had already shown himself to be a brilliant student when he graduated in 1982 from South China College of Tropical Crops with a biology degree. At Washington University, he distinguished himself as an outstanding researcher in plant genetic engineering.

After delivering a research paper before the prestigious Frontiers of Science conference in New Hampshire, he was swarmed by recruiters from American research laboratories. They offered him salaries starting at more than $50,000 a year.

But he also received a phone call from Han Xu, China’s ambassador to the United States at the time, who invited him to Washington for a talk. Han offered Chen a free trip to China and a chance to meet with presidents of all the leading universities.

Chen was treated royally everywhere he traveled. He was most impressed by his reception at Beijing University. Finally, he said, the State Commission of Science and Technology made him the offer that he could not refuse: “If you come back, we will give you a certain amount of money, over $1 million, to establish a national lab for biotechnology. And we will offer you an associate professorship.”

Chen--a thin, energetic talker who came to an interview at his office wearing tennis shoes, corduroy trousers and a leather jacket--said he considered it a compliment: “It was a real nice offer because at that time, 1987, associate professors were all real old and I was only 26.”

Today, Chen, one of the stars of the overseas recruitment program, is dean of the College of Life Sciences at Beijing University, the youngest academic to hold such a position in modern Chinese history.

As part of the program that allows foreign-trained scientists to keep their Western affiliations, Chen also holds a position as adjunct professor at Scripps Research Institute in La Jolla. He travels regularly to deliver research papers all over the world. In Beijing, he heads a department of 54 scientists who are trying to create genetically engineered rice plants resistant to viruses.

But Chen is the first to admit that not all has gone well since his return. He found himself politically isolated during the Tian An Men Square student movement days. And the most troubling aspect of being home, he says, is facing the petty jealousy of academic colleagues who resent his youth and his success.

“There have been some low moments,” he said, pausing reflectively during the interview. “I still think it was the right choice to come back. But China is a very complicated and complex society. There is a lot of jealousy. Sometimes you say, ‘If I lived in the U. S. A., this wouldn’t happen. It’s my right to be successful. I earned it.’ But you don’t have any personal right in China. This country has been equalized too long under Communist control.”

For Zheng Quan, the road back was not paved with such gold. China, despite its affection for music, does not place as much value on a violin maker as it does on a research scientist whose discoveries might someday affect crop yield.

Zheng, the son of engineers from a business family in Shanghai, learned to play the violin as a child. But during the Cultural Revolution he was sent to work in rural Anhui province as a peasant farmer to pay for his “bad class background.”

After eight years of toil in the fields, his hands were too coarse for the concert violin. But he served with a small music troupe in Anhui for which he made sets and repaired instruments. While there, he also met a violin master from Beijing who noted Zheng’s talent with wood and taught him the basic techniques for making the instrument.

In 1983, Zheng and two other Chinese men were chosen to attend violin-making schools in Europe. The others, who studied in Germany, married Germans and stayed. Zheng, who studied in Cremona, Italy, came back--but not until he had won several international competitions.

To encourage him to return with the craft he perfected in Italy, the government gave him $50,000 to buy materials, which he brought back in 10 large cases. Today he teaches violin making at the Beijing Institute of Music, where he has 10 full-time students. To supplement his income, he builds and sells three instruments a year and repairs violins for others.

Like many Chinese, he suffered unfairly during the Cultural Revolution.

Why did he come back?

“I am a traditional person,” he said in an interview in his Beijing apartment, his box of woodworking tools hanging on one wall. “When I went to Italy, the purpose was very clear: I had the responsibility of bringing Italian technology to China and to start a group of people making violins. Although I have had to make individual sacrifice, there are other rewards. The Chinese can make good violins.”

The main hope of the Chinese government in winning the students back is that what happened earlier in Taiwan and South Korea will repeat itself here. China’s aggressive re-recruitment of its own students is modeled on similar efforts in those countries.

In the 1960s, both Taiwan and South Korea sent thousands of students abroad, mostly to the United States. In the beginning, relatively few returned. In Taiwan, the rate initially was about 5%.

But as the economies of the two “little dragons” began to boom in the late 1970s and the 1980s, more and more students returned. Today, the majority of overseas students return to work in their home countries.

The gamble here is that the same thing will happen in China as the economy expands, creating new opportunities. When senior leader Deng Xiaoping assumed power in 1978 and formulated the open-door policy to the West, there was already concern that some students sent overseas might not return.

But China has a history dating to the 19th Century of overseas students returning home, bringing Western science and ideas with them. Early Communists such as Chou En-lai and Deng himself perfected and polished their ideology in Europe. Current leaders Li Peng and Jiang Zemin both studied in the former Soviet Union. So when Deng considered the possibility of a “brain drain” caused by sending students abroad, he justified it by saying that a 5% loss would be acceptable.

Deng and others counted heavily on traditional Chinese cultural patriotism to bring students home. But they failed to see how weary the people had become of communism in the wake of the Cultural Revolution, which ran from 1966 to 1976. In fact, the return rate for students from the United States turned out to be the inverse of what Deng had deemed acceptable: Only 5% returned, 95% stayed away.

In his soon-to-be-published survey of Chinese students in America, co-written by Chinese education scholar Chen Changgui, Zweig found that patriotism was a factor for only 19% of students who said they planned to go home.

But the survey, conducted between January and May, 1993, showed that only 7.3% completely ruled out the possibility of return. More than 50% of those polled said they were probably or certainly returning.

The biggest concern affecting their decision to return to China, students said, was the specter of political instability, possibly after the death of ailing leader Deng. “Given the importance attributed to economic factors and the fear of political instability,” Zweig concluded, “if China successfully weathers Deng Xiaoping’s succession, and if the economy continues to reform and to grow, significant numbers of Chinese may return.”

In that case, the Chinese gamble of sending its best and brightest abroad may succeed, but at a high price, Zweig noted. By welcoming the returning students home like heroes and granting them incentives and privileges, a message is being sent to the rest of China that shatters its traditional strong sense of cultural self-reliance.

“They have created a route,” said Zweig in a telephone interview, “where the way to rapid advancement passes through the U.S.”