File photo: IC

Winners of The Nobel Prize, Turing Award and Fields Medal, as well as academicians of the Chinese Academy of Sciences and other qualified top-caliber talent, can get reduced rents on apartments of no more than 100 square meters in the Tongzhou District of Beijing. 

If larger apartments are preferred, the area in excess of 100 square meters will be charged according to the standard of public rental housing in the same location, said a notice published on Tongzhou government's website Tuesday.

Discounts are being offered in three residential communities, and the units range in size from 40 to 85 square meters, the notice showed.

Netizens on Weibo, China's Twitter-like social media platform, had a range of opinions about the notice, with some praising the local government's efforts to attract talent while others called for stronger preferential treatment for experts.

"This is the right attitude towards talent," a netizen named XiamiaoNikki said. Some expressed a welcome attitude toward the measure, while other netizens said that high-end experts should get free housing due to their great contributions to society.

Yet others said that "free rent" or "rent subsidies" are similar to providing complimentary apartments to talent on some level, and scientific achievements should not be measured by financial benefits.

"Talent attraction is a two-way process that must take both sides' demands into consideration," Li Jingguo, professor at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, told the Global Times Wednesday.

"Local governments' methods should be in line with their unique scenarios, and the attractiveness should be considered in advance, in a bid to provide effective measures to achieve the goal," Li said.

The Beijing Municipal Commission of Housing and Urban-Rural Development issued a document in July 2018, on optimizing housing support and ensuring the development of top talent. This document was mainly adopted to promote the employment and entrepreneurship of talent in Beijing, according to takefoto.cn, the official website of Beijing Evening News.

Beijing's Haidian District announced its talent attraction method as well Sunday, expanding the scope of public rental housing security for innovative talent and loosening the limitations on applicants' hukou (household registration), the Beijing Youth Daily reported Monday.

Besides the local governments' talent attraction methods, the National Development and Reform Commission recently announced "key tasks for new urbanization construction in 2019", which loosens the restrictions of urban hukou to promote urbanization. 

Major cities have also issued policies on talent attraction and hukou systems, which showed that talent can help drive the economy and have a positive impact on urban development, according to ce.cn on May 13.