Many of the students appear to stay on as settlers; this was the case with the more than 27,000 from China for whom Australia became home after Tiananmen killings in June 1989. But many also return to their place of origin: in the 1960s, only about 5 to 10 per cent of the students who left returned to Taiwan; by the 1980s, this proportion had increased to about 25 per cent. The fact that Taiwan emerged as one of the newly industrialized economies (NIEs) in the interim cast some doubt on the supposedly damaging effects of the brain drain.