The Chinese Talent Program Tracker is a catalogue of Chinese Party-State-sponsored initiatives aimed at cultivating China’s domestic talent pool in support of China's strategic civilian and military goals. Viewed by Beijing as vital to Chinese economic and social development, talent programs aim to recruit everyone from experts to students of both Chinese and non-Chinese citizenship to fill positions across government, industry, defense, and academia to drive the innovation and growth of the Chinese economy.

The information in this catalogue, as described in Chinese documents, resulted from analysis of primary Chinese sources publicly available on PRC ministry and government websites, state-owned media sources, and Chinese university websites. It is not meant to provide a comprehensive assessment of individual talent programs. Rather, it aims to make this information more accessible to the general public so they can have a better understanding of the depth and breadth of China’s talent initiatives.

This version of the catalogue includes national-level talent programs. Further iterations will include provincial, municipal, and sub-municipal-level programs. A user guide can be found here:

For more information on this subject, please see related CSET translations and publications. You may download the content of this catalog here.

The author is grateful to Alex Bowe and Joy Ma for their expertise. In addition, the author would like to thank Igor Mikolic-Torreira, Dewey Murdick, James Dunham, Remco Zwetsloot, Ryan Fedasiuk, Dahlia Peterson, Rita Konaev, Melissa Flagg, Anna Puglisi, Rebecca Kagan, Daniel Hague, Alexandra Vreeman, and Lynne Weil for their suggestions on style and content, and Rebecca Gelles for a technical review.