Because of the potential power and rapid economic development, China currently not only has been one of the world’s top exporters, but also endeavors to attract a lot of foreign investments and talents. Beside, currently more and more Taiwanese have jobs in China. Under these circumstances, what I want to research is to explore how China government attracts foreign talents for assisting its economic development. Compared with other seven countries, the issue of attracting foreign talents for China would be new so that I decided to choose several represent countries from North America, Europe, and Asia regions for having further exploration on how different countries attract foreign talents to assist their countries’ economic development. The study found the contribution of most foreign talents in China would focus on the main five industries—electronic information, biomedicine, advanced manufacturing, new materials’ field, resource and environment, and emerging saving and new energies. Rapid economic development has caused the urgent talents’ need in China. In this regard, both of China central and local governments have been triggered on developing and coordinating more comprehensive policies of attracting foreign talents than before. Due to national economic development goals, especially in high-skilled and high-end industries, to attract international student and to relax immigration regulation have been the important tools of attracting and retaining foreign talents. However, what suggestion the study would like to give is that the government should notice the unbalanced incentives provided between foreign and domestic talents. Otherwise, the government may play as a role of forcing domestic talents creating their careers overseas.

This thesis addresses the “foreign talent” situation in Singapore with an ethnographic account of the lived experiences of immigrant PRC students on scholarships, or “PRC scholars.” For some two decades, the Singapore government has annually recruited middle school students from China in their hundreds, selecting them through tests and interviews, granting them full scholarships at either pre-undergraduate or undergraduate level, and, very often, “bonding” them to work subsequently in Singapore for a number of years. Wooed and appropriated in such a way as prized potential human capital, PRC scholars exemplify the Singapore state’s desire for “foreign talent.” In the first decade of the twenty-first century, as the influx of all manners of “foreign talent” into the small city-state gathered pace, local sentiments and discourses of resentment arose. The local-vs-“foreign talent” problem became a serious strain on a city and people proud of their cosmopolitanism. This thesis analyzes the “foreign talent” situation through the ethnographic “macro-trope” of desire. It argues that “foreign talent” is a site of convergence and divergence, collusion and collision, accommodation and contestation, fulfillment and failure of various individual, sociocultural, and political desires and longings. Through the lens of desire, and its psychoanalytic undertones and insights, this thesis looks ethnographically into the PRC scholars’ “foreign talent” journeys in nuanced ways. Based on ethnographic fieldworks carried out in a Chinese middle school and a Singaporean university, the thesis shows how Chinese students are constituted as specific subjects of desire, and how they subsequently develop certain perceptions, attitudes, and stereotypes about the local “other” as well as about themselves after arriving in Singapore as “foreign talent.” Infused with multifarious desires, the PRC scholars’ experiences are often characterized by angst and dissatisfaction; yet it is also argued that generative subjective transformations take place precisely amidst these dynamics and pragmatics of desiring. Ultimately, this thesis seeks to make possible an ethical re-imagination of the “foreign talent” situation in Singapore from the perspective of desire; to provide an account of the so far little-studied Chinese migrant students in the context of Singapore; and to speak more broadly to the cultural and subjective dimensions of human experiences in the context of educational mobility, identity politics, and globalization.