Thousand Talents Plan
Chinese academic program
The Thousand Talents Plan or Thousand Talents Program (TTP), or Overseas High-Level Talent Recruitment Programs is a program by the government of the People's Republic of China to recruit experts in science and technology from abroad, principally but not exclusively from overseas Chinese communities. The original program was replaced by another program called Qiming, administered by the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology.
Law enforcement and counterintelligence agencies in the United States, Australia, Canada, and other countries have raised concerns about the program as a vector for intellectual property theft and espionage.
Background
According to data from the U.S. Department of Energy's Oak Ridge Institute for Science and Education, 92 percent of Chinese who received a science or technology Ph.D. in the U.S. in 2002 were still in the U.S. in 2007. To reverse this trend and to build the size and prestige of China's university system, the central government of China recognized the need and turned to attracting overseas Chinese and top foreign-born talent from the world's best universities.
The Thousand Talent program is the most prominent of China's more than 200 talent recruitment programs. It grew out of the "Talent Superpower Strategy" of the 17th National Congress of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) in 2007. The CCP Central Committee and State Council of the People's Republic of China elevated the program in 2010 to become the top-level award given through China's National Talent Development Plan to strengthen innovation and international competitiveness within China. In 2019, the program was re-branded as the "National High-end Foreign Experts Recruitment Plan." The CCP's United Front Work Department's Western Returned Scholars Association is the official representative body for program participants.
Previous attempts to attract foreign scientific talent through a decentralized network of approximately 600 "talent recruitment stations" worldwide had been largely ineffective at convincing top researchers to leave developed countries permanently.
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This entry incorporates text from “Thousand Talents Plan” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.