Profile

David Zweig (Ph.D., University of Michigan, 1983) is Professor Emeritus, Division of Social Science, HKUST and Director, Transnational China Consulting Limited.  He is Vice-President of the Center on China’s Globalization (Beijing). He was a Postdoctoral Fellow at Harvard University in 1984-86. He was a fulltime faculty member at HKUST for 25 years. He was Director of the Center on China’s Transnational Relations at HKUST for 15 years. Dr. Zweig studied in Beijing in 1974-1976 and did field research in rural China in 1980-1981 and 1986. In 1991-92 and 1997, he did field research in Jiangsu Province on China’s “opening to the outside world.” Since 1991, he has surveyed and interviewed academics, scientists, entrepreneurs, and employees who returned from studying abroad, and Mainland-born Chinese working overseas. In June 2012, he gave Li Yuanchao, then head of the Organization Department of the Chinese Communist Party, a critical evaluation of the CCP’s Thousand Talents Plan. He has twice given presentations to the Beijing Municipality CCP Committee’s Organization Department about reverse migration of talent.

He received several grants from the Hong Kong Research Grants Foundation (RGC), as well as the Central Policy Unit of the HK government, The Ford Foundation, the United States Institute for Peace, the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, the Chiang Ching-kuo Foundation, Department of External Affairs (Canada), Asia-Pacific Foundation (Canada), Japanese External Trade Organization (JETRO) and the Henry R. Luce Foundation. In 2013, he was awarded the Humanities and Social Sciences Prestigious Fellowship from the RGC, Hong Kong.

He is the author or editor of ten books, including Internationalizing China: domestic interests and global linkages (2002) and Sino-U.S. Energy Triangles: Resource Diplomacy under Hegemony (2016). With the late Don Devoretz, he edited special issues of Pacific Affairs (September 2008), and the Journal of International Migration and Integration (Fall 2006), on the migration of ethnic Chinese in East Asia. He also organized a special issue of Asian Survey, focusing on Hong Kong- Mainland relations. In May 2020, his report, America Challenges China’s National Talent Programs (with Kang Siqin), was published by the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, DC. He is a Contributing Writer to the South China Morning Post

He has presented seminars and lectures to financial companies, including Goldman Sachs, Deutsche Bank, J.P. Morgan, Merrill Lynch, Morgan Stanley, HSBC, and Societe Generale. In June 2019 he gave a seminar to Aramco’s Vice-President for Research and his staff. He has also consulted on Chinese politics and East Asian International Relations with numerous governments, including Canada, the US, Sweden, Norway, UK, Israel, China, Japan, India, Hong Kong, Finland, France and Turkey.

He has two online classes registered with COURSERA, one on domestic Chinese politics and one on China and the World, where (as of August 2020), he had taught over 21,000 students. He also taught for 10 years in the EMBA and MBA programs at the School of Business Management at HKUST. The EMBA program has been in the top three EMBA programs in the world for much of the past decade.

Selected Publication

Books

• Sino-U.S. Energy Triangles: Resource Diplomacy under Hegemony, David Zweig and Hao Yufan, eds. (Routledge: London, 2015, published in paper in 2016).
• Internationalizing China: Domestic Interests and Global Linkages (Cornell Series in Political Economy, Cornell University Press, 2002).
• Freeing China's Farmers: Rural Restructuring in the Reform Era (M.E. Sharpe, 1997).
• China's Brain Drain to the United States, with Chen Changgui (Berkeley: China Research Monograph Series, 1995; republished by Routledge in 2013).
• Agrarian Radicalism in China, 1968-1981 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1989).

Journal Articles

• “‘The best are yet to come’: State programs, domestic resistance and reverse migration of high-level talent to China,” with Siqin Kang and Henry Wang Huiyao, Journal of Contemporary China, September 2020
• “Familiarity Breeds Contempt: China’s growing soft power deficit in Hong Kong,” in Kingsley Edney, Stanley Rosen, and Ying Zhou, Soft Power with Chinese Characteristics: China’s Campaign for Hearts and Minds (Routledge: 2020), pp. 241-261.
• “A Photo Essay of a Failed Reform: Beida, Tiananmen Square and the Defeat of Deng Xiaoping in 1975-76,” China Perspectives, No. 1 (2016): 5-28.
• “Overseas Students, Returnees and the Diffusion of International Norms into Post-Mao China,” with Feng Yang, International Studies Review, 16 (Fall 2014): 252-63.
• “Can China Bring Back the Best? The Communist Party Organizes China’s Search for Talent,” with Huiyao Wang, The China Quarterly, no. 215 (September 2103): 590-615.
• “Educating a New Generation of Students: Transferring Knowledge and Norms from Hong Kong to the Mainland,” with Liu Mei-hua, China Perspectives, 1 (2013): 73-86.
• “Returnee Entrepreneurs: impact on China's globalization process,” with Wang Huiyao and Lin Xiaohua, Journal of Contemporary China, 20: 70 (2011): 413-431.
• “Images of the World: Studying Abroad and Chinese Attitudes towards International Affairs,” with Han Donglin, The China Quarterly, No. 202 (June 2010): 290-306.
• “Redefining the ‘Brain Drain’: China’s Diaspora Option,” with Chung Siu-Fung and Han Donglin, Science, Technology and Society, Vol.13, No.1 (2008): 1-33.
• “Rewards of Technology: Explaining China’s Reverse Migration,” (with Chung Siu Fung, and Wilfried Vanhonacker), Journal of International Migration and Integration, Volume 7, No. 4 (Fall 2006): 449-71.
• “Learning to Compete: China’s Efforts to Encourage a Reverse Brain Drain,” International Labour Review, vol. 145, nos. 1-2 (2006): 65-90.
• “China’s Global Hunt for Energy,” Foreign Affairs (with Bi Jianhai), Vol. 84, No. 5 (September-October 2005): 25-38.

Research Interests

• Chinese Politics and Foreign Policy
• China’s Resource Diplomacy
• China’s talent programs and reverse migration
• Sino-American Relations 
• East Asian International Relations
• Hong Kong-Mainland relations

Teaching