A landlocked county's overseas Chinese can't wait to return home, whether to retire, for business or for educating their children. Lin Shujuan reports

Now the Spring Festival celebrations have ended, 70-year-old Chen Yuguang is preparing to pack and leave his hometown Qingtian, a land-locked county in East China's Zhejiang province. A Spanish citizen since the 1980s, Chen's three-month visa to China will expire soon and he must return to Spain to renew it before he can come and stay in his hometown again.

Mak Yuet Shan, 93, marveled at an old table that once had been used for washing and preparing Chinese vegetables. It brought back fond memories, she said.

Shan traveled by bus from Oakland on Friday with about 40 other Chinese-born senior citizens to see Marysville's old Chinatown, once California's largest outside San Francisco.

The group, affiliated with The Salvation Army Oakland Chinatown Corps and Community Center, had arranged in advance for tours of the Chinese American Museum of Northern California and the Bok Kai Temple, both on First Street in Marysville.

The sight of Romanesque architecture in rural China is a surprise that masks a greater problem for the emerging economic powerhouse. The country learnt of other cultures’ designs through the loss of its people to emigration. Foreign correspondent Clifford Coonan reports

The classic image of farmers tending their rice and tobacco fields in southern China is disturbed by the fortified castle in Italian Renaissance style.

Lovers, airport, goodbye kiss. Together these words did not make up a romantic story, but created an astonishing incident.

On January 3, at Newark Liberty International Airport in New Jersey, Jiang Haisong, a 28-year-old Chinese overseas PhD student, trespassed into a restricted area in order to kiss his girlfriend goodbye.

This led to a six-hour closure of the airport and the delay of 100 flights and thousands of passengers' trips.

MEMPHIS, Tenn.—World traveling flight attendant Ms. Wong wore red lipstick, sophistication, and a sense of humor to the Memphis performance of New York-based Shen Yun Performing Arts. She joked about China’s contributions spreading to the rest of the world.

“The girls that looked like they were flowing on water—to see their delicate foot movements—and it seemed like they just floated across the stage, [that] was when the beauty of the artistry hit me,” she said with an open, tender expression.

Beijing is getting into the Christmas spirit. Restaurants, malls, and upscale residences are decked with boughs of paper holly. Window panes all around are scribbled over with frosty, misspelled cheer ("Merry Chrismas!"). Hotels lend their lobbies to adorable choir children and their adoring parents for holiday carols. And eager boyfriends in the city are busily making Christmas Eve plans. At least they should be.

Last week, a reader posted this dicey query on my blog:

Overseas Chinese have helped pay for 27,642 primary and secondary schools on the Chinese mainland since 1979, and 25,229 of them – about 90 percent – are still in operation, chinanews.cn reported yesterday.

Another 2,413 schools have since been converted to other uses, such as homes for the elderly, kindergartens and local community clubs.

During the Sichuan earthquake, none of the 313 school buildings in the earthquake area paid by overseas Chinese collapsed.

The Chinese Language and Culture Education Foundation of China (CLCEF) on Monday received a donation of 90 million yuan (13.2 million U.S. dollars) to encourage more overseas Chinese youth to study China's language and culture.

The donation was jointly made by five enterprises. Rongqiao Group, a real estate company, donated 50 million yuan and other four contributed 10 million respectively.

NEW DELHI, Oct. 21 (Xinhua) -- "There is certainly no restriction on Chinese people's belief in Buddha. I had to squeeze in the crowds of believers to get into some of the temples," said Sunita Dwivedi, an Indian journalist and photographer who had traveled to almost every Buddhist temple in China.

China's booming economy, favorable policies and excellent research environments are resulting in a surge in talent returning from the West, helping the nation to compete in global innovation, a top education specialist said yesterday.

"They are being attracted by the policies aimed at enticing skilled overseas Chinese to return home to develop their careers and build an innovative country," said Lu Yucheng, chairman of the China Overseas-Educated Scholars Development Foundation.