Nearly 72 per cent of overseas Chinese students have returned to China after finishing education abroad since the late 1970s, a government-backed agency said in a report.
From 1978 to 2011, about 8,18,400 Chinese students returned home after studying abroad, said the report by the Chinese Service Centre for Scholarly Exchange (CSCSE), which is administered by the Ministry of Education.
In 2011 alone, nearly 186,200 chose to return, nearly 40 per cent more than that in the previous year, said the report, adding the centre had offered services to 1,10,000 of them.
To help those returning students, the centre organised a special job fair for them, which is scheduled for November 24.
The fair, featuring more than 500 jobs in big enterprises or public institutions, has attracted more than 1,500 applications, state news agency Xinhua reported quoting the report.
However, their return is posing a stiff competition to those students graduating locally as those overseas degrees had an edge in job hunting. With economy slowing down, Chinese job market is shrinking and struggling to accommodate about six million students who come out of universities every year.