Abstract:    With the continuous enhancement of China′s comprehensive national strength and global market competitiveness, more and more overseas talents choose to return to China for their own career development, among which, returnee entrepreneurship has become an important path for the career development of returnees. Overseas returnees′ learning and working experiences make them have rich insights in the field of management skills and professional technology, in that way, they play a unique role in the innovation and entrepreneurship field in China. However, entrepreneurship is rooted in specific social and market situations, and its difficulties and challenges in the survival and development of new enterprises cannot be underestimated. Unlike many previous literatures which believe that returnees can directly bring more competitive advantages to enterprises, this paper finds that returnees have the re-embedding dilemma. And that re-embedding dilemma faced by returnees themselves may destroy the advantages they bring so that it does not necessarily provide enterprises with a longer possibility of higher performance and sustained operation. The negative effects of returnees may include returnees′ alternative business opportunities, re-embedding liabilities, team culture conflicts within a company, and so on. Facing liability of returnees may damage the advantages of returnees′ newly-established technology enterprises, and then from the perspective of the duration of business, they do not account for the enterprises that grow better than the local ones. 
    This article takes the re-embedding dilemma of returnee technology companies as the starting point, and based on the archives of technology companies in one Science and Technology Park from 2005 to 2007, it examines the liability of returnees to the survival of new technology companies through the vertical tracking of ten years from 2008 to 2018. And then, through the COX proportional hazards regression model, we further find that enterprises cannot simply rely on their inherent characteristics of returnees to obtain long-term competitive advantage, shape and maintain a higher level of sustainability. Continuous innovation ability can curb the liability of returnees and it is the key factor for enterprises to survive and develop.
This article has reached the following conclusions: First of all, returnees with cutting-edge technology and management skills can quickly form a unique competitive advantage under the strong support of various policies. The survival rate of returnee technology companies in the start-up period is higher than that of locally-grown companies. In the meanwhile, the liabilities such as alternative business opportunities, local context re-embedding, and team conflicts exist. This difference has closed over time, and returnees may face more obvious dilemmas in a complex and changing domestic business environment. When the liability of returnees outweighs the positive effects brought by the inherent advantages of returnees, returnees′ new technology companies do not account for survivability better than local companies. Enhancing the continuous innovation capability of start-ups is not only an effective means to test the knowledge reserve of enterprises, but also a target requirement to improve the operational capabilities of enterprises. Enterprise technology accumulation can effectively make up for the liability of returnees, and strengthen the process of transforming scientific and technological knowledge into scientific research results, thereby shaping enterprises, and maintain a higher level of operating efficiency and improve the ability to continue operations.
   Furthermore, this paper provides a variety of management enlightenments and policy recommendations: firstly, returnee entrepreneurs should fully realize the importance of the complex domestic business environment, closely integrate their pursuits with the survival and development of enterprises, and fully estimate the difficulties that new technology enterprises may face in the process of R&D capability and transformation of results. And improve their ability to adapt to market development, play the role of linking the advantages of domestic and foreign resources, in order to minimize the liability of returnee embedding. Secondly, enterprises should employ personnel with experience at home and abroad appropriately, optimize the internal structure of team members, establish effective internal communication mechanisms, reduce communication costs that caused by heterogeneity of teams, and help returnee entrepreneurs make full use of national policy support, quickly adapt to the domestic social and market situation; at the same time, new ventures need to continue to strengthen the level of independent research and development, enhance the transformation effect of scientific and technological achievements to scientific and technological benefits. Finally, besides introducing innovative and entrepreneurial policies to attract overseas talents, the government and science parks should also establish a scientific evaluation mechanism for the effect of policy implementation, improve the system of intellectual property protection, build a fair competitive market environment, and build a market environment that has both global market attraction as well as effectively support the development of enterprises in sustainable business environment.
    In summary, the possible contributions of this article are as follows: In terms of management practice, this article reveals the unique situation faced by returnee entrepreneurs compared to local entrepreneurs. Objectively speaking, entrepreneurial failure is a major problem that entrepreneurs want to avoid but have to face. But this article focuses on the comparison between returnee entrepreneurs and local entrepreneurs, which can provide inspiration for the management practices of different enterprises. Then in terms of management theory, unlike many previous literatures that returnee entrepreneurs can directly bring more competitive advantages to enterprises, this article finds that returnee entrepreneurs do not necessarily provide companies with longer-term sustainability. The possibility of operation, overseas alternative business opportunities for overseas returnees, local market barriers, and conflicts in team culture may all damage the advantages of returnee entrepreneurial enterprises, and thus do not account for better than local growth companies from the perspective of continuous operation time. This provides the necessary foundation for building a management theory with Chinese context. 
    As for empirical research methods, this article also provides a rooted research path, that is, to implement a long-term tracking study with an appropriate sample size. It not only considers comparative studies between samples, but also can explore the characteristics of the samples. The characteristics, through the setting of scientific and standardized research steps, summarize and analyze the specific problems in the survival process of enterprises, which provides a theoretical basis and analytical perspective for subsequent in-depth research.

Key words: liability of returnee, start-up, innovation capability, survival analysis