The fierce talent-grabbing competition among cities has now spread to high school graduates.

The battle for talent is seeing new trends.

Not long ago, Hengyang, a sub-central city in Hunan Province, held a high-standard symposium and exchange meeting for representatives of 2026 senior high school graduates, inviting more than 80 outstanding local graduates admitted to top universities including Tsinghua University, Peking University, Shanghai Jiao Tong University, Fudan University, and Zhejiang University this year to attend.

It is not an isolated case. Recently, at the prefecture-level city level alone, many places including Bazhong in Sichuan, Baoshan in Yunnan, and Shantou in Guangdong have held symposiums with similar themes. Earlier, Hengshui in Hebei even issued a "development invitation" to students at the 2026 high school graduation ceremony. In addition, at least Luoyang in Henan, Chaozhou in Guangdong, and Lishui in Zhejiang also held relevant activities last year.

One common theme of these conferences, apart from extending congratulations to outstanding graduates, is to emphasize "giving back to their hometowns".

For example, Shantou explicitly expressed its hope for outstanding graduates: never forget their hometown while pursuing studies outside, return to Shantou after completing their studies, and contribute their knowledge to the high-quality development of their hometown.

Bazhong also sent a message to outstanding students: always keep the development of their hometown in mind, contribute wisdom and strength to the construction of their hometown with their own expertise, and repay the nurturing grace of their hometown with practical actions.

This scene echoes the grand occasion of highland cities with abundant higher education resources such as Nanjing and Wuhan calling on graduates to "stay" during the university graduation season in previous years.

It not only reveals that the talent competition is extending to a more front-end stage, but also truly reflects the deep-seated anxiety faced by a large number of third- and fourth-tier cities under the imbalance of regional development.

01

Obviously, all these cities share a common feature: most of them are ordinary prefecture-level cities of the third and fourth tiers, with relatively limited economic volume and urban energy level, and there is a clear gap in talent attraction compared with first- and second-tier central cities.

At the same time, these places are generally lack of influential higher education institutions, which means they do not have a potential talent reservoir, and are naturally at a disadvantage in the "talent grabbing war".

From this perspective, holding symposiums for outstanding senior high school graduates seems to become one of the few theoretical "talent-grabbing" starting points. It not only builds emotional connections with local students, but also is actually the closest moment these cities have ever been to "top talents".

It should be noted that although these students are locally trained, they are about to go to top universities across the country, and most of them will stay in larger cities for development in the future.

Therefore, for their hometown cities, "advancing" to establish a closer emotional bond with them is undoubtedly a pragmatic move. At least, it is more efficient than waiting for them to graduate and then "snatch talents" from universities across the country.

This logic is actually the same as that of more and more cities attaching importance to developing "alumni economy" and calling on entrepreneurs working outside to return to their hometowns in recent years.

But on the other hand, it also shows that these cities are facing increasing pressure in the talent competition. Taking Hengyang as an example, since the seventh national census in 2020, the city's permanent resident population has decreased by 280,000, making it one of the cities with the largest population reduction in Hunan. In the same period, the permanent resident population of Bazhong in 2025 was 2.578 million, which was 140,000 less than that in the seventh national census.

In this context, playing the "emotion card" more and trying every means to retain the talents they have cultivated is not only a helpless response, but also a rational choice.

However, judging from the current general trend of talent flow, the effect of playing the "emotion card" should not be overly optimistic.

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When a considerable number of cities can only focus their talent competition on "locally cultivated talents", this in itself reveals a kind of helplessness, which means that they are becoming more and more passive in the national talent competition.

Behind this dilemma is the long-term structural imbalance of the regional development pattern.

It should be noted that many third- and fourth-tier cities have actually been continuously exporting high-quality students and talents to the eastern coastal areas and first- and second-tier cities.

To a certain extent, a paradox has even formed: the more excellent students a city cultivates locally, the more likely they are to drift away from their hometown and eventually make wedding dresses for others.

This forces people to face up to a cruel reality, that is, in the map of regional competition, some cities are destined to play the role of "talent exporting places".

Moreover, this kind of "contribution" can hardly be compensated.

Usually, when talking about a place that "cannot retain people", people tend to attribute it to "insufficient industries". But industry and talent are inherently a cycle of "chicken lays egg, egg lays chicken". Without industries, there is no way to attract talents; without talents, it is difficult for industries to upgrade.

For the vast majority of ordinary prefecture-level cities, it is imaginable how difficult it is to break these two dilemmas at the same time without sufficient policy support and factor endowment.

For a long time, the discussions on how to balance the gap in the distribution of resource factors between different regions have mostly focused on regional compensation for resource output, while there is little systematic attention and institutional arrangement for the implicit contribution of "talent output".

From the national level, although there have been relevant guidelines, for example, it was clearly stipulated a few years ago that "universities in the eastern region are not allowed to poach talents from the central and western regions and the northeast region", in the face of the objective law of talent flow, the role of such administrative constraints is limited after all.

03

Therefore, as industrial upgrading puts higher and higher requirements on the quality of talents, the current regional competition is entering a more differentiated stage. The speed of talents and population gathering in advantageous regions will only be faster, and accordingly, the pressure faced by ordinary prefecture-level cities in the state of talent output will only increase correspondingly.

For such cities, relying solely on the "emotion card" to retain people is obviously far from enough. The current initiative of "investing in people" undoubtedly gives these cities the highest priority.

For example, instead of investing a large amount of resources in the "material" level, such as the "high-stakes gambling" of infrastructure and parks, it is better to tilt more resources to the "soft environment" such as public services, living environment, education quality and medical security.

After all, for young talents, in addition to career platforms, quality of life, development space and urban warmth are also important decision-making variables.

At the same time, more institutional designs at the macro level are needed to balance this structural imbalance.

For example, in the process of building sub-central cities and promoting coordinated regional development, "talent support" and "intelligence sharing" should also be included in the consideration scope of performance assessment and resource allocation.

A positive signal is that the "Several Policies and Measures on Supporting Yueyang and Hengyang to Accelerate the Construction of Provincial Sub-central Cities" recently issued by Hunan explicitly puts forward optimizing the supply of educational resources: support Hunan Institute of Science and Technology, University of South China and other universities to strengthen discipline construction.

Support Hunan Institute of Science and Technology to build a special zone for chemical engineering disciplines, add new doctoral degree awarding units, and introduce high-level talents in chemical engineering disciplines through flexible talent introduction methods. Support the construction of high-quality and characteristic application-oriented undergraduate universities such as Hunan Institute of Technology and Hengyang Normal University.

Promote the cooperation between subordinate universities such as National University of Defense Technology, Central South University and Hunan University, provincial "Double First-Class" universities and research institutes such as Xiangtan University and Hunan Normal University, and Yueyang and Hengyang to jointly build industrial research institutes, academician workstations and post-doctoral research workstations.

In addition, cities such as Guang'an in Sichuan and Hebi in Henan have also achieved a "zero" breakthrough in undergraduate universities.

At the end of the day, extending the "talent-grabbing" tentacles to high school graduates is just the tip of the iceberg of the talent anxiety of some cities.

Under the general background of increasingly differentiated urban talent agglomeration, how those pure talent "output place" cities can rediscover their own positioning and way out is destined to require more systematic exploration and breakthroughs.

This is not only related to the future of a certain type of cities, but also related to the long-term health of the regional competition ecosystem.

This article is from the WeChat Official Account "Western City Affairs", written by Xibu Jun, and published with authorization from 36Kr.