Quora: Why are more Chinese graduate and doctoral students returning to China after they graduate?

Ridzwan Abdul Rahman answered:

This shows the difference between Indian and Chinese graduates.

Many Indian graduates seek employment in the US and hold high positions in US companies, while Chinese graduates return to China to participate in building up their own country. This has been going on for many years and this is partly the reason for China’s massive growth over the years.

Indian graduates need to be more nationalistic and return to India to help build their own country up.

This concerns the comments below about China providing job opportunities as a reason for the graduates returning to China. I agree that this is true based on my own experience in the IT industry in Malaysia.

Ever since the 1990s (could have been earlier) until about 2010, we regularly received calls from IT companies in India asking us to outsource application development to them because they are cheaper. And many programmers from India came to Malaysia to work on projects. I believe Malaysia is just one of many countries that the Indians approach. This indicates a lack of jobs in India.

But there is another difference between India and China. While China is internationally well known for Alibaba, Weibo, Wechat, Tencent, etc, India is not known for similar things.

Somehow, I get the impression that Indians choose to work for others instead of developing something for themselves. And the US provides many opportunities to work for others. Some Chinese graduates, on the other hand, prefer to create something for themselves.