kind of a response to you, but also some random thoughts.
While I do think China can have a lot of control over who/how many to let in, making a decision on who/how many is much harder. Running a country means dealing with many factors with complex interactions with each other, and it's hard to predict the exact outcomes. I think we will need to rely a bit on faith and value judgment.
Faith and value judgement is where it's all at when we can't use black and white rules to separate people since these rules would be too discriminatory on paper.
Both Elon Musk and Jensen Huang's parents are immigrants would have fit only the k-visa but not the R-visa. But they created companies that gave the US an enduring edge over China. The US let in a lot of people to have these two to change the world.
Yeah but America is a relatively talentless society compared to China. If America didn't do this, it'd be an idiot non-competitive country. China, on the other hand, is teeming with incredible talent; our only weakness is the low starting point. We are at a point where we overcome this with selective talent recruitment to attack bottlenecks. We do not need mass talent flow because is redundant with what we already have. In the end, Elon Musk and Jensen Huang are both getting thier lunches eaten by Chinese companies.
From our side, can a Chinese person do the work that Katherine (Katherine's journey to the east, BS from the US, and MS from China) was employed for? Certainly! But I think she has made and continues to make tremendous contributions to China (likely more than anyone on this forum!).
Do what work? Show off rural China to Westerners? Other than that, she's a PhD in environmental science and she married a Chinese dude. We have millions of excess males so she's cool in complementing China's needs I guess. Special case approval for her!
I can think of two reasons immigrants tend to be more successful, given the same degree and even GPA. 1) Self-selection on risk-taking and 2) being bi-cultural from immigration.
They're not in China unless they're either bringing success from their own countries or they're coat-tailing white worship. People who come to China are adventurous, but Chinese people are still smarter.
I think we can all agree that a degree is not a good predictor of how much a k-visa candidate will benefit China. It's also hard to measure some of the benefits of having foreign workers on the Chinese society in general. I think using rigid measures of GDP and birth rate in the past was a lesson that we shouldn't repeat. The only suggestion I can come up with here is using an interview process that doesn't give an immediate answer and having multiple interviewers to reduce bias (like a job interview).
A crossing the river by feeling the stone approach is probably the right approach again on this issue. Start small and expand over time as we see fit. It will take a while for all the parties (visa applicants, the Gov, employers, and the Chinese people) to iron it out.
M'kay
