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Download China is offering financial grants and other benefits to boost its ability to lure top experts in science and engineering back home from posts overseas. Zhan Wenlong, vice-president of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, said it is making full use of recruitment plans such as the One Hundred Talents Program and One Thousand Talents Program, which are aimed at attracting foreign and Chinese experts, to ensure candidates are provided with good scientific research facilities and living conditions. "For those selected through these programs, we pay them 2 million yuan ($326,000) as a startup fund and 600,000 yuan for resettlement, making their research and living conditions as good as they are abroad," he said. The academy has so far attracted 2,493 Chinese returnees since the One Hundred Talents Program was first launched in 1994. Pan Shilie, assistant director of the Chinese Academy of Sciences' Technical Institute of Physics and Chemistry in Xinjiang is one of them. As a postdoctoral researcher in physics and chemistry at Northwest University in the United States, Pan had a chance to be a faculty member in a US university. But he chose to return to China in 2007, as he believed that career development would be better with support from the government. "In the US, the level of development in my research field is high, but in Xinjiang there is still a gap waiting to be filled, and I can contribute more there," Pan said. | 
