Hundreds of thousands of Chinese are studying abroad, but those who return are more likely to channel their energy into lifestyle change than revolution, writes Fintan O'Toole from Beijing.
When Dong Tong, sitting in a Starbucks in the diplomatic quarter of Beijing, started to talk about democracy in Europe, I assumed he meant free elections and competing political parties. But he was thinking of two small experiences he had while he was studying at Louvain University in Belgium, moments that might seem inconsequential to a European but that were profoundly revealing to him.
One happened shortly after he arrived. He went to use the university library but didn't yet understand the system. When he made mistakes filling out his forms, a receptionist was rude to him and spoke to him as if he was an idiot. He felt so angry and humiliated that he did something he would not have done back home in China: he made a complaint.
He was stunned when a senior member of the university administration in charge of international students came to see him the next day and apologised profusely.
Later, he wanted to visit Brussels and booked a train ticket online. On the day he was to travel, there was a rail strike, but no one told him that the trains were cancelled, and he ended up wasting his day. He was again hurt and confused and wrote a letter of complaint to the rail company, just to get his feelings off his chest. He could hardly believe it when he got a letter of apology back, enclosing a book of 10 tickets for the same journey.
"In China, my letter, if I had bothered to write it, would just have gone in the bin. Along with the way I was treated by the university library, it taught me something about what democracy means."
Dong Tong is in his mid-20s and is a project manager in the international business division of the China Minsheng Bank. Like many of the better-off members of his generation, he had a hankering to study abroad, to see some of the world, to upgrade his skills. And like many of those who do so, he found the experience profoundly unsettling. In the last decade, with the opening up of the economy, more and more young Chinese men and women have gone to western countries as students.
Talk to bright, ambitious university students in China and the chances are that they want to study abroad, in the United States for preference, but failing that in Europe or Australia. If they make it, they find that their place in the world has changed. Unlike their parents, who really only knew China, they find that they have new reference points, new criteria by which to judge life at home.
The interesting question is how this will affect China itself, whether an educated middle-class with experience of living in other societies will become a force for change.
The stark reality of China's decision to allow young people to leave to study in the West is that it has turned into both a brain-drain and a tacit criticism of China itself. Close to three-quarters of those who went to study at foreign institutions of learning between 1978 and 2005 did not return to China: of 933,400 who went away, just 233,900 came back.
There may have been periods after the crushing of the 1989 student-led protests when the Chinese government was not entirely unhappy to see budding intellectuals leave for good. But as the pace of development has increased, the country faces a serious dearth of trained professionals.
This month, the general secretary of the official China Scholarship Council, Zhang Xiuqin, acknowledged that the country faces "huge talent shortages" in areas such as telecommunications and information technology, high-tech agriculture, life sciences and public health, physics, energy and environment, engineering, applied social science and international trade studies.
To try to fill these gaps, the state is currently sponsoring 7,200 students of these fields at foreign universities, especially in the US, the UK and Germany. But the vast bulk of the 118,500 Chinese students currently abroad are there under their own steam.
The numbers returning to China after their studies (about 27,000 last year) are gradually increasing as economic opportunities attract them back, but most are still choosing to stay away. Dong Tong's experiences may give some idea of why this should be so.
In some ways, it seems puzzling that Dong Tong would have wanted to study abroad at all.
He grew up in Beijing, graduated from university there and quickly got a good job in banking, making him a member of a privileged elite. But after two years he was "feeling dissatisfied and looking for a chance to go abroad". He had been on a few work trips to Europe (including a visit to the Irish Financial Services Centre in Dublin), but he regarded study in the US as "the first prize" and applied to American colleges. Unable to get a place there, he settled for a course in financial studies at Louvain, took a two-year leave-of-absence from his company, and went to Belgium in 2004.
The shift meant a substantial downgrading of his lifestyle. "Your personal status changes from being a relatively privileged person, a banker, to being doubly on the outside, as a student and a foreigner. Money doesn't buy as much in Europe as it does in China, so you can't afford to live well and you drop down a level or two. And it's not so easy to connect with people. They know Chinese food and they have an idea of the surface appearance of the country, but they don't know what's going on behind your face, and you probably don't know what's going on behind theirs."
But all of these difficulties seemed to him to be far outweighed by the public attitudes displayed in his interactions with the university library and with the railway company. The sense of respect for the individual that he saw in Europe made up for the diminution in his own social status.
He returned to Beijing after two years in Europe - including short spells in Heidelberg in Germany and in London. But it was not really by choice. Of the Chinese students who were at Louvain with him, he reckons that two-thirds have not returned.
"They've stayed in Europe, but without any real sense of why they're staying. They hadn't planned to emigrate, but they're not planning to come home either. They're hanging on but their purpose is not so clear."
He himself hoped to stay in London, and almost got a job with a British bank that was planning to set up a Chinese operation. But the company's plans changed, and he had passed up other opportunities in the meantime. His boss in China asked him to return, and he did so reluctantly.
The Dong Tong who came back to Beijing is not the same person as the one who left, however. "I'm absolutely not the same," he says. "I've had to revert to the local, Chinese person that I was, and maybe my friends and family see me as the guy they always knew. But I recognise that something's changed." Part of the change was that he was, while in Europe, literally converted. He had grown up as an atheist and then had "sometimes tried to practise Buddhism". In Belgium, he met a Christian missionary, and was "amazed that this guy had spent 10 years learning Chinese purely to teach the Bible to Chinese students."
He joined a Bible study group and has tried to keep the faith on his return home. "Sometimes I'm lazy about it and after two months back here I was becoming less diligent. It's not so easy here to feel part of a Christian community. But it's still had a big effect on who I am."
But it's not just religion that has made him feel like a different person after his period abroad. "China itself is a different place for me now, not because it actually changed very much in two years, but because I see it differently. My China was changing almost from the moment I left here. I didn't see a lack of democracy and transparency before, because I didn't really know what those things were. After living in Europe, I now know what they are and I can feel their absence."
China, he acknowledges, has changed a lot in the last four or five years, and it was "a popular idea among my Chinese contemporaries in Europe that the place is booming and that there are plenty of opportunities. This is true to some extent. But China isn't booming compared to the West - the rate of growth may be very fast but there's a very long way to go before we catch up with America or Europe. And as for opportunities, well, opportunities still largely depend on having the right connections. For people like me, the best opportunities are in being a bridge between western companies and the Chinese market, so it still depends on being connected to the West."
Dong Tong says his experience abroad has made him "much more restless", and the obvious question is whether his restlessness and that of people like him has direct political implications. Westerners tend to assume that it must, that the experience of living in Dublin or Seattle or Sydney - where political and social debate is open and criticism of the authorities practically obligatory for students - must be generating a core group of sophisticated dissenters with access to foreign languages and ideas. But Dong Tong is sceptical. For one thing, he points out, those who are most likely to be unhappy with life in China simply don't come back to live there. Some of those who do come back channel their restlessness into trying to get residency abroad - he himself has applied for a Canadian visa. But in general, he feels his generation of former expatriate students are unlikely revolutionaries. "You have to remember that the vast majority of those who could afford to go abroad to study almost by definition have parents who are beneficiaries of the system."
This is clearly true. Even a primary degree in China can place an enormous financial burden on a student's family. A recent survey by the China Youth Development Foundation found that poorer students were paying about €680 a year in tuition and accommodation fees but that their annual family incomes were only €480. With 80 per cent of the students surveyed saying that their families had become poverty-stricken because of educational expenses, it is obvious that study at prestigious western universities is a luxury that few can even contemplate. Those who can do so tend to have positions worth protecting within the status quo.
Besides, reckons Dong Tong, his generation is not deeply politicised. "They missed history happening in 1989 (during the Tiananmen demonstrations). They don't have a cause. So they will have some effect on China if they come back, but it's more to do with lifestyle than with politics. They channel their sense of being different into clothes and music and food and the internet, not into political, deep-level change. The government has been very clever in allowing those kinds of freedom."
In that sense, it may be that the students who come back from abroad are much less of a problem for the Chinese system than those who do not. As it becomes a more sophisticated and complex society and as it develops ambitions to be a "knowledge economy" in the 21st century, China can't afford to be donating its emerging intellectual elites to western countries. Attracting them back, however, might require a shift, not just in the economy, but in the intellectual and political climate. To stop the brain drain, the system might need to change its mind.