Rise of The Sea Turtles

Charles Zhang is practically the personification of hip, 21st-century China. The flamboyant, MIT-educated entrepreneur founded and runs one of China's two biggest Internet portals, Sohu.com. Last week he welcomed an international swarm of revelers to an Olympic bash at Beijing's fashionable Lan Club (décor by Philippe Starck), where he announced his new gig during the Games: talk-show host. "I learned a lot from Letterman and Leno while living in the States," he said confidently.

Zhang is speaking to a different audience now. He says the anti-Western backlash that erupted in China this spring—after pro-Tibetan demonstrators disrupted the Olympic torch relay in London, Paris and San Francisco—was entirely justified. He himself called for a boycott of French goods and media after an unruly scrum broke out over the torch in Paris. "That was the first time Chinese people as a whole stood up to the world," he says. "It's good for Chinese people ... That incident proves that when Chinese are upset, they can find their voice."

Such sentiments are common on the mainland. But people like Zhang were supposed to be different: he's what Chinese call a hai gui—"sea turtle"—referring to someone who has lived overseas. (The phrase is a pun on haiwai guilai, meaning "returned from overseas.") Their numbers are growing by the tens of thousands every year, and as the sons and daughters of the elite, they have an outsize influence once they move back to China. In the West there's long been an assumption that this cohort would import Western values along with their iPods. They were envisioned as the bridge to a more open, liberal, Western-friendly China.

That daydream got a cold bath during the torch relay this spring, when furious Chinese students in the West showed they could be even more jingoistic than Chinese who had never left home—and good luck to anyone who dared buck the trend. One courageous Duke University freshman from the coastal city of Qingdao tried to intercede in a campus confrontation between a dozen or so pro-Tibetan demonstrators and a much larger group of pro-Beijing Chinese students. For her trouble, she was called a "race traitor" and a "whore"; feces were dumped on her parents' doorstep.

Measuring attitudes among sea turtles can be difficult, especially with all of Chinese society changing around them. Still, some empirical data are beginning to emerge. Prof. David Zweig, head of the Center on China's Transnational Relations at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, is directing a research project based on responses from thousands of returnees from campuses in Canada, Japan and Europe. The data show they're "no less jingoistic than those who have never gone abroad," Zweig says. "As in, 'My country, right or wrong'." What's more, he adds: "A significant proportion of them believe that using force to promote China's national interests is acceptable." Bottom line? "It means the post-1989 policy to imbue youth with nationalism through 'patriotic education' has succeeded," Zweig says.

China has a long tradition of chauvinism, and for some sea turtles, intimate acquaintance with Western attitudes has only intensified their feelings of defensiveness. Author and business consultant Jim MacGregor, who deals frequently with hai gui, says, "The richest people here are the most anti-Western." Even as they sip cappuccino at Starbucks or show off their new Buicks, the last thing most want is to make over their homeland in the West's image. They're after something far more ambitious: a China that lives up to their sense of national greatness. The pacesetters among hai gui don't aspire to be "modern," as Europeans and Americans often use the word—as a synonym for Western. Instead, prosperous young returnees tend to see themselves emphatically as modern Chinese.