This article reviewed the Chinese policy and talent programmes after 1978 to reverse the historically brain drain of China. Under the current wave of reversed migration, Chinese overseas returned scientists and scholars have gradually changed the labour structure of Chinese academia. We used the dataset of the 2008 National Survey of Science and Technology Personnels, conducted by the Chinese Academy of Science and Technology for Development (CASTED), to do quantitative analysis and comparison on the performances of overseas returnees and local scholars. It is found out that the overseas PhD returnees are still in short supply. Overseas returned scientists are generally better off in academic and innovative performances. Sizable qualitative interviews showed that even within the influx of overseas returnees, the labour market is also a social and political field that the social network and policy design would largely direct the flow of overseas returned scientists.

In 1995, a research team from a renowned US university started collecting blood samples from villagers living in Anhui province, China, with the cooperation of local research institutes and the Chinese government. In 2000, the US university team was accused of violating research ethics principles by not adequately informing the participants about the research and not sharing benefits fairly. Subsequent investigations by American and Chinese media and authorities showed that the US research institute, its research personnel and a pharmaceutical company involved were benefiting substantially from the project, while the Chinese research participants and the government were not. Three levels of exploitation can be distinguished in this case: • the exploitation of local individual citizens as human research participants • the exploitation of the local scientific community in China • the exploitation of the country's national interest In order to avoid such exploitation, high-income countries as well as low-and middle-income countries should strengthen their institutional arrangements and improve their cooperation mechanisms, in order to ensure that both sides benefit equally from international science and technology cooperation.

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