Graduates from foreign universities used to be highly sought out by employers in China. A 2017 study found that haigui are now less likely to receive a callback from potential employers compared to Chinese students with a Chinese degree.[2] Possible causes of this reversal include the rising quality of Chinese education institutions and the high salary demands of haigui.[3]
Over 800,000 recently graduated haigui returned to China in 2020, an increase of 70% from 2019, largely due to the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic.[4]
Motivations
Some haigui have returned to China due to the late-2000s recession in the U.S. and Europe.[5] According to PRC government statistics, only a quarter of the 1.2 million Chinese people who have gone abroad to study in the past 30 years have returned.[5] As MIT Sloan School of Management professor Yasheng Huang, an American, states:
The Chinese educational system is terrible at producing workers with innovative skills for Chinese economy. It produces people who memorize existing facts rather than discovering new facts; who fish for existing solutions rather than coming up with new ones; who execute orders rather than inventing new ways of doing things. In other words they do not solve problems for their employers.[6]
Etymology and history
The word is a pun, as hai海 means "ocean" and gui龟; 龜 is a homophone of gui归; 歸 meaning "to return". The name was first used by Ren Hong, a young man returning to China as a graduate of Yale University seven years after leaving aboard a tea freighter from Guangzhou to the United States.[7]
^Fraiberg, S., Wang, X., & You, X. (2017). Inventing the world grant university: Chinese international students’ mobilities, literacies, and identities. Utah State University Press, An imprint of University Press of Colorado.
