Against the backdrop of intensifying global strategic competition, structural imbalances in youth employment, and deep-seated demographic transitions, China's current overseas study policies have exposed significant issues such as structural mismatches and misaligned policy directions. This paper centres on the concept of a ‘strategic dual-track overseas study system,’ aiming to reconfigure China's overseas study policies to simultaneously serve the ‘Belt and Road’ national cooperation initiative and alleviate domestic structural employment pressures. It proposes a systemic reform framework that elevates the educational function to a national strategic tool. The study employs structural modelling and system dynamics methods to construct a causal feedback model of the ‘externalised population and employment relief mechanism,’ integrating game theory structures with population policy pathways to analyse the strategic relief effects and technology introduction synergy pathways under the dual-track orientation. Through policy simulation, this paper estimates that if 300,000 to 500,000 young students are sent to Belt and Road countries annually, and a 50% to 60% settlement rate is achieved with policy support, it is expected that 150,000 to 250,000 people facing employment pressure can be effectively alleviated annually. In the long term, through the closed-loop pathway of study abroad, employment, and settlement, a distributed Chinese international talent network can be formed to support overseas investment, cultural dissemination, and the expansion of geopolitical influence. The research findings indicate that ‘strategic study abroad’ can serve as a systemic regulator to mitigate youth employment crises, optimise talent structures, and enhance national soft power, significantly enhancing the geopolitical resilience of policies and the external carrying capacity of population distribution. The conclusion states that only by embedding study abroad policies into the national macro-development strategic framework and establishing a long-term mechanism driven by the interplay of ‘education-population-geopolitics’ can the dual transformation of the national globalisation strategy be achieved: internally alleviating employment structural pressures and externally expanding soft strategic influence.
Wei Meng (Mon,) studied this question.