The ambitious plan to attract talents from overseas has attracted the first group of 96 scientists and 26 entrepreneurs to the Chinese mainland.

Of the group, more than 80 hold foreign passports, and four are of non-Chinese origin, the Central Organization Department's bureau of human resources has told China Daily.

The plan is widely considered one of the key strategic moves to boost the country's strength of innovation. Launched in December, it promises attractive funding and compensation to the elite personnel who are working overseas and willing to work in China.

"The number and caliber of applicants are beyond our expectation," said a senior official with the bureau. China's sound economy and improving science and research environment provide a broader platform for the talents, said the official, who declined to be named.

When Ding Hong quit his post as a physics professor at Boston College to return to China, it shocked his colleagues.

"People thought staying in the US was good for my career. But I wanted to contribute to the physics research going on in China," he told China Daily.

"The projects I am working on will be top quality and are ahead of the US by at least two years. China can compete for the world's top talents - the government has offered tremendous support."

Li Yuanchao, head of the Central Organization Department, said earlier the plan aims to help the country achieve its goal of becoming an innovation-oriented nation. It aims to attract 2,000 talents in 5-10 years.

China reportedly tops the list for the number of researchers, with 38 million scientific personnel. But only 10,000 are considered top-level experts.

The plan targets people with full professorships or the equivalent in developed countries. It offers a State relocation package of 1 million yuan ($146,000) in addition to salaries and research funding from the universities and institutes that hire them.

The entrepreneurs typically bring on board their own technology and intellectual property rights, and set up enterprises in science parks.

In the past 15 years, the country has attracted more than 4,000 researchers, mostly at postdoctoral or associate-professor levels, to work in the country through the Chinese Academy of Sciences' 100-Talents Scheme and the Ministry of Education's Yangtze River Scholar Scheme.

Once a faculty member at Stanford University in California, Zhou Xingjiang decided to return to China four years ago.

"Life was fine in the US, but it wasn't enough," the 43-year-old physicist told China Daily.

Driven by the dream of spreading his wings and running his own laboratory, he returned to China, where he has gone on to invent the world's top spectroscopy equipment used to study the energy level of electrons, something he feels he would have been unable to accomplish if he had stayed in the US.

Miao Hong, deputy director of the CAS's personnel department, said the new scheme shows China is capable of competing on the world arena for leading talents.

Zhao Qinghua, an official of the Ministry of Science, said "the government has sufficient investment and resources in science and industrial development. Now we need the best people to make the investment pay off".