The China of the early 1980s was not a place Gong Li imagined he would return to for more than a brief visit. It was emerging from the dark days of the Cultural Revolution and though Mr Li was a student at one of the country's best universities, Shanghai's Fudan university, he decided to grasp an opportunity to leave the country and study in the US.

After completing his studies in Houston, he joined Andersen Consulting (now Accenture) in 1985. Partners there had high hopes for him. Mr Li says: "They told me, 'You will be ideal to go back to China. There will be a market out there, but we don't know when'."

But he has come full circle. Today, the 48-year-old is chairman of Accenture in greater China, where he leads 2,400 consultants.

Mr Li is an example of a hai gui, or "sea turtle", the Chinese term for those who left China to study and work overseas but are now "swimming home" to take high-level positions at multinational companies.

In contrast to the days when multinationals readily parachuted western expatriates into China on packages that cost as much as $1 million (€840,000), they have been aggressively filling top management positions in China with local talent.

The task is made more challenging by a dearth of qualified candidates. A report from executive search firm Heidrick & Struggles gives several reasons for this: education and work opportunities of many now aged 50-60 were disrupted by the Cultural Revolution; the local talent pool was depleted by China's "brain drain" of the 1980s and 1990s; there are few strong business schools in China; and local Chinese executives often lack global know-how.

The war for talent in China reaches to the highest management levels. Morgan Stanley this month poached Wei Christianson from Citigroup to head its China business.

Microsoft sued Google when its senior researcher, Kai-Fu Lee, defected in 2004 to head the search engine's research and development centre in China.

Ideal candidates often attended university in China and graduate school in the West, have five to 25 years of career experience overseas and hold senior mid-management to executive level positions in multinationals.

This group represents the cream of the crop: just after the Cultural Revolution in the late 1970s, less than 1 per cent of Chinese high school students were admitted to university.

As a result, the lucky few can command sky-high salaries.

Pay packages for top-level managers are comparable to those in the US, running into hundreds of thousands of dollars.