[By Liu Rui/Global Times]

The salmon was cooked to perfection, numerous German beers had been quaffed, the appropriate French wine had been sipped and now the conversation turned to the end-of-days for the itinerate expats in China.

We were proof that China is no longer the hardship post where adventurous Westerners once came to dally in an exotic culture.

It used to be that just about any Tom, Dick and Jane could come to China and be bestowed with the grand title of "foreign expert." The fun would last until the novelty wore off after three to five months, and then the consternation and even bickering would set in.

Nowadays life here has been substantially upgraded, and China has become more sophisticated and picky about whom it invites to help build its harmonious society.

There's also much increased competition from a well-educated school of haigui, or "sea turtles," as returning Chinese are called. With more haigui paddling their way home to their motherland, they're creating a new breed of expat - the repatriated expat.

"Sea turtles" have earned a fancy-pants high degrees; their second language is near perfect and their mother tongue is Chinese. What more do you need to know?

For my physicist friend Liu, deciding to return to China pretty much a no-brainer after a decade and half in the US. Armed with a PhD from Caltech he didn't take a pay cut, got his own lab and, most importantly, plenty of funding to pursue what he hopes will be breakthrough science.

In the US he was constantly seeing his life flash before his eyes - a cushy, mundane job; house in the suburbs; kids; retirement; Florida. He feared his fate would be an uninspired life abroad.

He now works for an energy giant that brags about having 43 foreign-educated scientists and engineers on staff. All of them are haigui, which may also reveal the company's ethnocentric hiring practices.

The haigui are also becoming the expert of choice for foreign firms, and rightly so. A big nose is no longer a face-gaining prerequisite for multinationals wanting to set up in China and hit the ground running.