There are various sources and directions of driving forces that influence the decision- making of intellectual actors to return, including the stickiness and repulsion from the host country, the pull and thrust of the home country, and even the attraction of a third country. Moreover, the dynamic mechanism is also diversified, including economic driving forces (including wage level, employment opportunities, economic prospects, purchasing power, etc. ), and also involves systems and networks, culture and life cycle. As rational actors, the return decision of intellectual migrants is mainly because they clearly feel the pulling force from the home country (PS-PR), or the pulling force from the home country is obviously stronger than the sticking force from the host country (PS>PL). At the same time, the paper believes that the final return decision-making of intellectual action is not all economically rational action, but also involves socially rational actiones such as system-enforced, policy-induced, immigration network-driven, cultural value-driven and other social rational actions. Finally, this paper analyzes the main motivation and action types of intellectual backflow at different development stages by taking the return history of Chinese overseas students as the sample. The study found that the return motives of the returnees are diversified in the 170 years of Chinese returnees’ history, and they show different action types at different development stages, which are obviously political, social and complexity. In the restricted flow stage, the return of returnees is mainly driven by institutional compulsion; in the free flow stage, the driving sources of returnees’ return are more diversified, including economic-driven, policy-induced and even patriotic emotion-driven.
