Do “Sea Turtles” creep faster than “Soft-shell Turtles”: A quantitative study of academic performance of law faculty in premier Chinese law schools

• Main Author: ZHANG, Wei
• Format: text
• Language: English
• Published: Institutional Knowledge at Singapore Management University 2009
• Subjects: Education Law; Legal Education
• Online Access: https://ink.library.smu.edu.sg/sol_research/2617; https://ink.library.smu.edu.sg/context/sol_research/article/4575/viewcontent/turtle.pdf
• Institution: Singapore Management University

Since the adoption of the “Reform and Opening” policy in 1978, China has revived its century long tradition of sending students and scholars to study in western countries. In recent years, the unprecedented economic growth, paired with an increasingly competitive rate of compensation, has attracted a considerable number of such foreign degree holders back home to work or teach. In modern Chinese vocabulary, these returning talents are named as “sea turtles”, a word mimicking the pronunciation of the Chinese equivalent of the English phrase “coming back from abroad”. On the other hand, in compliance with the ancient Chinese rhetorical technique of antithesis, those receiving their entire education domestically2 are referred to as “soft-shell turtles”, a traditional Chinese delicacy totally home-grown.