Rise of The Sea Turtles

Previous generations of sea turtles were patriotic in a different way. A century or more ago, Chinese students were sent abroad to learn science and technology from the West, and returned with a sense of mission. "They felt the most important thing was to help Chinese education; they wanted to teach," says dissident journalist Dai Qing, who has just finished writing a book about that era.

Now the business opportunities available on the mainland are at least as big a draw for returnees. But even someone like Dai, who served a term in prison for opposing the 1989 Tiananmen crackdown, says she feels the tug of the motherland. She's just returned from her fourth stint overseas—a year at Australian National University studying "relations between dictatorships and individuals." When she first left the country in 1991 for a Nieman Fellowship at Harvard, many acquaintances mistakenly assumed she'd never go home. "People say, 'Dai Qing's stupid—after 20 years of going overseas she doesn't even have a green card'," she says with a laugh.

Many sea turtles have their own theories about why Chinese overseas might show a hostile streak. For one thing, they run out of patience with Westerners' ignorance. "To be honest, when we go abroad we do find people asking strange questions, like whether China has modern buildings or cars," says Danny Huang, who lived in Canada and the United States for more than a decade before returning to run an educational charity in Shanghai. "Sometimes it's hard not to feel they have some bias." For others, anger against the West can ease the pangs of homesickness, suggests Shanghai University film teacher Shu Haolun. "They need a bond to their motherland," says Shu, who studied cinema and photography at Southern Illinois University before returning to China in 2003. "They're being anti-Western to feel attached to their own country."

Some of the nationalism exhibited by Chinese living abroad might also be sustained, rather than diluted, by the Internet. "As soon as they get online they can be totally immersed in a Chinese environment," says Zhao Chuan, a novelist who lived in Australia from 1987 to 2000 before coming home to write about Shanghai. "When we were studying abroad ... occasionally you went to Chinatown to read a Chinese paper. Now if you're in the U.K. you can easily not read English papers or watch English TV."

Others say the returnees' driving force isn't exactly nationalism. Instead, they argue, it reflects the extraordinary assertiveness of young urban Chinese. Decades of strict one-child family-planning policies have produced a generation of only-children—"little emperors," the Chinese call them. "Young Chinese feel they have the right to speak out about anything," says Victor Yuan, who studied for a year at Harvard's Kennedy School and now heads Horizon, a market survey consultancy. Some rebel against both Chinese and Western norms—like architect Ma Yansong, who apprenticed under Zaha Hadid in London and is famous for his designs mocking the regime's obsession with huge, imposing buildings. "This generation doesn't want to accept any ideological message, whether it's from the Communist Party or Voice of America," says Yuan.

The power of hai gui is visibly growing. Two of China's cabinet ministers earned their doctorates at universities outside the country, and approximately 100 officials at the level of vice governor or higher have studied overseas for at least a year, according to Zweig's figures. Patriotism notwithstanding, he says his research suggests that as Chinese spend more time outside the country, their thinking becomes more nuanced and internationalist: "They don't want to see China pushed around but are smart enough to know China makes mistakes." At the Lan Club last week, Zhang said it's time for China to prove it can do things right. "After suffering for hundreds of years and then for 30 years scrambling to get things right, now China's getting the respect of the world," he said. "Chinese are gaining more self-respect, too, so they should become more responsible." With luck, that means becoming more responsible to the world, not just to China.

© 2008