Ten years ago Chen Ling was so desperate to get out of communist China she played what she called a "trick". Reuters had offered a one-year Oxford fellowship to Xinhua, the official Chinese News Agency where she worked.
Applicants had to write an essay on their view of journalism. "I wrote something to please my boss," she said. "I then wrote another essay and sent it to the Reuters Foundation. I got the fellowship ahead of 200 others." Chen stayed on in London for six years but is now back in Beijing. She is a returnee. With the speed of economic growth in China, opportunities are opening up at home for highly-qualified people like her, who left China to find a more fulfilling life overseas.
In the past 20 years, 210,00 of the 320,000 Chinese students who went abroad failed to return. Now they are starting to come back, in small but significant numbers. It is a reversal of a trend going back hundreds of years, and is similar to what is happening in Ireland. Emigrants can now find at home what they went abroad to seek. Ms Chen and two other returnees spoke recently of their experiences at a lunch organised by the Foreign Correspondents' Club of Beijing. "The commonest question I get from people is why I came back at all," said Ms Chen, who is now a business consultant and author of a book for Chinese people wanting to go abroad.
"I came back because I couldn't be as important as I felt in China," she explained with remarkable candour. "Like it or not, I was born Chinese, though I have Western values and thinking.
"When I spent Christmas in London, I felt very alone. Today I walk along a Beijing street, and I feel I am not alone." She had some problems adjusting. Her friends couldn't accept that she wasn't as keen on karaoke - the big craze in Beijing during the 1990s - as they were.
"Everyone I knew could sing, as if all the people in the room were their lovers, but I could not," she said. "Also people never call me `comrade' now. They say `Miss' which makes me feel very strange because I am over 40. And instead of asking `Have you eaten?' when we meet, they ask `Have you got divorced?"' Mr Tang Haisong, who majored in laser physics before going to Boston, where he sold sneakers and attended Harvard Business School, said he came back because "in the United States you can make a comfortable living but in the end it is not enough - moreover I love good Chinese food". After his return in 1998, Mr Tang co-founded an Internet firm called etang.com as "a lifestyle portal" for young Chinese, which now employs 150 people.
"I wanted to bridge the best of what I had learned from the West with what I knew about China," said Mr Tang, who is one of the success stories of what he calls the "yellow generation". These are Chinese between the ages of 18 and 35 "who have cellphones and go out for dinner", in contrast to their parents in the "red generation".
The son of a farmer outside Shanghai, he also felt the pull of family. "My parents and grandparents were getting old and I wanted to spend more time with them," he said.
One of the difficulties for young Chinese professionals was that they had little idea what the modern world was about. "If I grew up in the US my parents would be professionals already," he reflected. "A lot of parents in China are workers, like mine, and we have no exposure to professionalism. So it's still important for young Chinese to go abroad. Walking around 5th Avenue gives me more ideas than I can get from a book." Mr Liu Chi, a Philadelphia-trained lawyer who worked in New York before coming home to a Beijing law firm which assists foreign companies, also finds that he is expected to take clients to karaoke sessions.
He refuses, as "we are basing our firm on the US model". One of the attractions to him was that "20 years ago Chinese law was closed and `confidential', but not any longer".
China had changed a great deal, and he was currently representing a Western company suing two Chinese courts. He admitted it was difficult for returnees. "You see from people's eyes that they regard you differently and you associate with friends with similar background," he said. "I feel very strongly I am Chinese but I belong to an international community - though," he added laughing, "I can't stand cheese." Chinese traditionally do not eat milk products.
The bottom line was "whether by coming back you are better off financially or professionally".
Ms Chen agreed, though she thought people admired those who had been abroad. "The important thing is that if you get a good job in China today you can make as much as your Western counterpart," she concluded.
Mr Tang too experienced some resentment at his success, but "as long as you are genuine they will respect you". He agreed that the opportunity to do well was a big incentive. "Money is like oxygen," he said.