FINE porcelain, Chinese-landscape scrolls and calligraphy adorn the office of Shi Yigong, dean of the School of Life Sciences at Tsinghua University in Beijing. Little about his ornamentation hints at Mr Shi’s 18 years in America, where, like thousands of Chinese students, he decamped for graduate study in the early 1990s. Mr Shi eventually became a professor at Princeton University but he began to feel like a “bystander” as his native country started to prosper. In 2008, at the age of 40, he returned to his homeland. He was one of the most famous Chinese scholars to do so; an emblem for the government’s attempts to match its academic achievements to its economic ones.

Sending students abroad has been central to China’s efforts to improve its education since the late 1970s, when it began trying to repair the damage wrought by Mao’s destruction of the country’s academic institutions. More than 3m Chinese have gone overseas to study. Chinese youths make up over a fifth of all international students in higher education in the OECD, a club mostly of rich countries. More than a quarter of them are in America.

Every country sends out students. What makes China different is that most of these bright minds have stayed away. Only a third have come back, according to the Ministry of Education; fewer by some counts. A study this year by a scholar at America’s Oak Ridge Institute for Science and Education found that 85% of those who gained their doctorate in America in 2006 were still there in 2011.

To lure experts to Chinese universities, the government has launched a series of schemes since the mid-1990s. These have offered some combination of a one-off bonus of up to 1m yuan ($160,000), promotion, an assured salary and a housing allowance or even a free apartment. Some of the best universities have built homes for academics to rent or buy at a discount. All are promised top-notch facilities. Many campuses, which were once spartan, now have swanky buildings (one of Tsinghua’s is pictured above). The programmes have also targeted non-Chinese. A “foreign expert thousand-talent scheme”, launched in 2011, has enticed around 200 people. Spending on universities has shot up, too: sixfold in 2001-11. The results have been striking. In 2005-2012 published research articles from higher-education institutions rose by 54%; patents granted went up eightfold.

But most universities still have far to go. Only two Chinese institutions number in the top 100 in the Times Higher Education World University Rankings. Shanghai’s Jiao Tong University includes only 32 institutions from mainland China among the world’s 500 best. The government frets about the failure of a Chinese scholar ever to win a Nobel prize in science (although the country has a laureate for literature and an—unwelcome—winner in 2010 of the Nobel peace prize, Liu Xiaobo, an imprisoned dissident).

Pulling some star scholars back from abroad will not be enough to turn China into an academic giant. Many of those who return do so on a part-time basis. According to David Zweig of the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, nearly 75% of Chinese nationals who were lured by a “thousand-talent” programme launched in 2008 did not give up tenure elsewhere. Such schemes have often bought reputation rather than better research. They typically target full professors whose more productive, innovative years may already be behind them. (They also favour experts in science, technology and management; the Communist Party is less interested in attracting scholars in more politically controversial fields.)

Chinese universities have great difficulty fostering talent at home. The premium on foreign experience in China has created perverse incentives, says Cao Cong of Nottingham University in Britain. It sends the message to today’s best and brightest that they should still spend their most productive years abroad. More than 300,000 students leave each year.

Research inside China is moulded by the heavy hand of the state. Many grants are allocated by administrators who lack expertise in evaluating proposals, rather than by open, competitive peer review. Staff are not encouraged to be sceptical about existing theories, especially those held by senior staff who control resources, says Mr Cao. The result is management by numbers: academics are rewarded for the quantity of their publications instead of quality. This creates incentives to eschew long-term, open-ended exploration. “Sometimes guanxi [connections] are all you need” to get promotions and grants, says Tsinghua’s Mr Shi, who since returning has recruited Chinese scientists from prestigious universities in America and elsewhere to work in his labs. In science the Communist Party has picked six main spheres of research to fund, including nanotechnology, climate change and stem cells. But letting officials decide on research is a poor recipe for innovation.

Until recently universities routinely hired their own students upon graduating. Many staff did not have doctorates, lecturers were given jobs for life with no motivation to excel and all promotion was internal. Ten years ago, when Peking University tried to replace this system with limited employment contracts and open competition for posts, it faced such resistance from its own staff that it had to shelve its plans.

Today the signs are more encouraging. Some universities are changing the way they recruit and hence finding it easier to attract staff from abroad. At Peking University departments now hire and promote using international evaluation-methods. They advertise jobs and academics apply for promotion and are rewarded according to their achievements.

Departments such as Mr Shi’s at Tsinghua have attracted private funding to top up salaries for tenured positions. Assistant professors at some elite institutions are paid as much as $70,000-80,000 a year, up to 80% of which comes from donations. But academic institutions the world over are notoriously slow to reform. China has more than 2,400 universities and research facilities—and so far only a few minds have been changed.