In the past decade, thousands of Chinese doctoral students received funding from the China Scholarship Council (CSC) to start a 1--2-year exchange study in European universities. Do these Chinese doctoral students significantly improve their academic skills and publications through such an overseas experience? What are the influencing factors for them to receive such benefits? Through a large-scale investigation, we confirmed the expectation that Chinese doctoral students did indeed receive benefits from these study abroad experiences in Europe, and identified several critical factors such as advisor and institution ranking for them to receive such benefits. These results confirmed our expectation that the advisor is the most important factor contributing to a successful abroad studying experience; such a conclusion is of important policy implications that CSC shall pay more attention to exchange Ph.D. students' collaborative supervisor and his/her research team.