Why do overseas Chinese feel so patriotic, but are unwilling to let them return to China?

About a Chinese American professor. After the end of the WG decade, our country began to reform and open up, and wanted to send a group of students to the United States to learn new science and technology. But at that time, the GRE and TOEFL standard examinations had not yet begun in China, so American universities had many concerns when recruiting Chinese students. To put it simply, they refused to accept them.

The Chinese professor wrote a letter to the then Vice Prime Minister Fang Yi, in which he suggested that some universities with good physics departments and graduate schools in the United States should be contacted and a standardized examination should be held in China every year. Select students to study in the United States. After receiving a positive reply (and later receiving strong support from Comrade Xiaoping), the professor wrote to the physics departments of 53 universities in the United States to invite them to participate in the project, and requested that each university waive the application fee because it was impossible for Chinese students at that time to exchange foreign currency. . Under difficult circumstances, he convinced his American colleagues and friends time and time again that the project finally succeeded and lasted for ten years. It is the famous CUSPEA project. This project has trained a large number of backbones in physics for China, and has extended to chemistry and biology. In 1985, the professor also helped China design a postdoctoral system that suited China's national conditions. He actively promoted the establishment of my country's Natural Science Foundation and introduced peer review into the allocation system of scientific research funds.

This professor also promoted the construction of many physics research centers in China. In addition, there are university entrance scholarships for outstanding high school students in China and the "Junzheng Scholarship" to promote cross-strait undergraduate scientific research exchanges. This professor is a Nobel Prize winner named Li Zhengdao. If everyone has heard of his story but just doesn’t know the details, then maybe not so many people know the following story. If I didn’t hear it from someone who experienced it, I wouldn’t believe it at all.

This Chinese professor is also a Nobel Prize winner. After the end of WG, in the twenty years from 1979 to 1999, he returned to China almost every time to help establish and develop the discipline of molecular reaction dynamics in mainland China. This is almost a process from scratch. From the beginning, he provided the design drawings of the instrument to the mainland laboratory to help build the instrument, and then he personally debugged the instrument for several days without sleep (at that time, he had already won the Nobel Prize). Later, he found that instruments alone were not enough, so he recruited young people from mainland China to study in the United States, trained them from scratch, and sent them to receive relevant instrument design training. Over the course of decades, he built an internationally advanced molecular laboratory in China. Reaction Kinetics Laboratory. His students have become our teachers and continue to train China's new generation of scientific and technical personnel in physics and chemistry. But the professor's story has been lost in time. Why? Because he returned to the place of his birth after 1999, some of his subsequent words and deeds were also controversial.

Because as other respondents said, patriotism has levels and circles. His growth and background determine his position. This position may be our opposite. The country he loves may only be the outermost circle, but his continent's academic contributions are indelible and irreplaceable. Even if there is no publicity, they will be passed on through word of mouth. Why do I tell these two stories? I just want to say that the patriotism of overseas Chinese is not just an empty talk as everyone imagines. Sometimes their efforts and contributions are completely unimaginable to those who have not experienced them. All walks of life in China have developed to this day. In many cases, the contributions of overseas Chinese are irreplaceable. The stories I know are far more than just these two.

However, due to various understandable reasons, in most cases the country does not publicize these contributions and cannot publicize them. In many cases they themselves don’t want publicity. But as long as they heard "overseas Chinese" during the Spring Festival Gala, they felt it was enough.

Maybe we will meet some not-so-good Chinese people outside who are forced to make a living, but we should remember what kind of person we want to be, and what kind of person we want to be. This is the most important thing, isn't it?