Now the Spring Festival celebrations have ended, 70-year-old Chen Yuguang is preparing to pack and leave his hometown Qingtian, a land-locked county in East China's Zhejiang province. A Spanish citizen since the 1980s, Chen's three-month visa to China will expire soon and he must return to Spain to renew it before he can come and stay in his hometown again.

He has been doing this same exercise for the past five years. "More than 30 years ago, we would try every means to leave our hometown. Now, we'll spare no efforts to return, again and again," Chen says.

Emigration overseas has a long history in Qingtian. Isolation — it is surrounded by mountains — and a lack of resources and government funding have forced the people of Qingtian to travel afar for survival since the late 1800s.

They roamed the country trading small commodities such as stone sculptures — a local specialty — and tea. Some happened to hop on board some ferries stopping by the estuary in the nearby city of Wenzhou, another town famous for its numbers of overseas Chinese.

However, large-scale emigration did not occur until the country's reform and opening-up in 1978. Over the past three decades, Qingtian's overseas population has surged to nearly 230,000, which means half of Qingtian natives now live overseas, spread across 176 countries mostly in Western Europe.

But this has not left their hometown deserted. Over the past three decades, Qingtian has catapulted itself from one of the poorest counties on the mainland to one of great wealth. With their newly accumulated fortunes in their adopted countries, an increasing number of its overseas Chinese are heading back home either for retirement, business, investment or for their children's education.

"Every overseas Chinese now knows two things: Only in your own hometown can you find heaven and China is the future of the world economy," Chen says from a downtown Qingtian café .

Lining both sides of the 300-m long street are modern buildings with facades reminding one of Europe in the Middle Ages. Five banks on the street, mostly privately owned, register annual foreign currency transactions of nearly $8 billion, the highest among all counties in the country.

Chen left for Spain in 1978 soon after that country relaxed its policy on emigration. He started off as a dish washer at a Chinese restaurant and two years later, rose to become a cook, and then started his own restaurant. He also managed to have his whole family and a few relatives migrate to Spain.

"I am no longer interested in business or investment. For people of my age, and as the first generation of overseas Chinese, I've done my part. Now I want to step back and relax," Chen says.