When it comes to national strategies, 海龟精英们 have generic and system knowledge, but lack local knowledge, or case knowledge, because their learning happened outside.
Africa has more people in U.S, can you see Africa is more advanced than China? At lease I cannot see that. What is china's strategy to build the national knowledge base? Sending millions of students overseas, or China has to build own knowledge creation system, encourage innovation on everything. From Africa case, we can see, the number of people overseas has no strong link to the domestic knowledge base.
We cannot always follow, why, take an example, VCR and floppy disks used to be very popular, very soon, they became out-dated, and replace by other technology like DVD and flash memory. Techonology always has short of life. Once we catch up, they are already not in market. Therefore the economic key is being a leader by own innovation and initiative capability.