In Hangzhou, China, Han Bicheng now heads a company developing brain-computer interface technology, a field that was largely confined to laboratories when he was pursuing his PhD at Harvard University in 2018.
That year, in a basement office in Boston, he met with a delegation from Hangzhou, the only group to travel that far to speak with him, a meeting that proved to be pivotal.
A few months later, Han moved his core technology and research team to Hangzhou Future Science and Technology City, where the local government provided tailored support to help him establish operations.
Han is part of a growing wave of foreign-educated professionals returning to China's booming science and technology sector, attracted by expanding opportunities and a more welcoming environment for global talent.
In 2025 alone, China recorded 535,600 returnees from overseas studies, according to the Chinese Ministry of Education. Longer-term, of the 7.43 million Chinese students who completed their studies abroad between 1978 and 2024, 6.44 million have returned.
Specifically, 5.63 million of those who returned, or about 87 percent, returned after 2012, along with the rapid expansion of China's economy and technology sector.
For many returnees, China offers advantages hard to find elsewhere. China's domestic market, application scenarios, and supportive policies create strong incentives for foreign-educated professionals to innovate or start businesses, said Guo Yuanjie, an associate researcher at China's National Academy of Education Sciences.
"Some innovations by foreign-educated talent are difficult to realize abroad, but can be implemented in China," he said.
This view was echoed by Zhu Hao, co-founder and CTO of Manycore Tech, a Hangzhou-based developer of spatial design software that grew into a unicorn company before listing on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange in April.
Zhu, who holds a master's degree from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign and previously worked at Microsoft and Amazon, said China's focus on core technologies is stronger than ever.
