The suggestion of a “reverse brain drain” in which more and more Chinese scientists are leaving America for positions in China has been broached repeatedly by pro-Beijing newspapers addressing worries that the Trump administration’s China Initiative scheme may return.
The Republican-dominated US House of Representatives on September 9 passed the Protect America’s Innovation and Economic Security From CCP Act, which calls for the revival of the discontinued China Initiative scheme to counter
- espionage,
- theft of intellectual property and trade secrets and
- threats posed by the Chinese government to critical infrastructure.
Before it can become law, the proposed legislation needs approval in the US Senate, where Democrats for now have the majority. And it needs the signature of the US President, who at the moment is a Democrat.
The Biden administration said in a statement on September 10 that it opposes this bill. It said it has worked to combat threats posed by trade-secret theft, hacking and economic espionage, including by actors affiliated with China.
“Grouping cases in the manner contemplated by this legislation would undermine the Department of Justice’s ability to investigate and prosecute such criminal activity, including by making it more difficult for the DOJ to obtain cooperation from victims and witnesses,” it said.
It also said the bill could give rise to incorrect and harmful public perceptions that the DOJ applies a different standard to investigate and prosecute criminal conduct related to the Chinese people or to American citizens of Chinese descent.
The result of the US presidential election on November 5 may change Washington’s view on the issue. And that possibility has weighed on scientists in the US who might be affected.
The China Daily, a mouthpiece of the Chinese Communist Party, said in August that many scientists of Chinese descent in the US were leaving the country because of the “push factor” of the China Initiative, plus some “pull factors” from China.
Citing a Stanford study with the title “Reverse brain drain? Exploring trends among Chinese scientists in the US,” the newspaper said 19,955 scientists of Chinese descent, who began their careers in the US, had left for other countries, including China, between 2010 and 2021.
The study was published by the Stanford Center on China’s Economy and Institutions (SCCEI) in July. Its statistics came from a paper published by the Proceedings of the (US) National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) in June 2023.
The starting year for the statistics was well before Trump became president in 2017 and before he pushed the China Initiative the following year. But the study said the number of China-born scientists migrating out of the US had steadily increased from 900 in 2010 to 2,621 in 2021. It said such a trend was partly contributed by “pull factors” such as China’s large and rapidly growing investment in science and the attractive financial rewards connected to positions in Chinese institutions.
The report added that a vast majority of the 5,800 Chinese students who earned doctoral degrees in science and engineering fields in 2020 chose to stay in the US.
Long-term stay rates
Earlier this year, the South China Morning Post said hundreds of Chinese scientists, including physicist Gao Huajian, geometer Song Sun, molecular biologist Fu Xiangdong and mathematician Sun Xin, had switched affiliations from American universities to institutions in China over the previous few years.
The Hong Kong-based newspaper did not say how many Chinese PhD graduates have decided to stay in the US for the period.
In April 2022, the Center for Security and Emerging Technology (CSET), a policy research organization within Georgetown University’s Walsh School of Foreign Service, said that, as of February 2017, 77% of the more than 178,000 international science, technology, engineering and mathmatics (STEM) PhD graduates from US universities between 2000 and 2015 were still living in the country. It said such high long-term stay rates are similar across different STEM fields.
It said about 90% of the 55,000 Chinese nationals and 87% of the 28,000 Indian nationals who completed STEM PhD programs in the US between 2000 and 2015 were still living in the country, compared with 66% of graduates from other countries.
It means that about 50,000 Chinese PhD graduates in STEM fields chose to stay in the US during the period.
Some history
It was in November 2018 that the Trump administration launched the China Initiative program to target hundreds of prominent Chinese-American academics and scientists, accusing them of having foreign links.
Charles Lieber, an American chemist and a nanotechnologist at Stanford University, was arrested in January 2020 due to his ties to China’s Thousand Talents Program. In December 2021, he was convicted of two felony counts of making false statements to the FBI and investigators. He was also convicted of four counts of filing false tax returns as he traveled from Wuhan to Boston with bags of cash.
Chen Gang, a Chinese-born American mechanical engineer at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), was arrested in January 2021 on charges of concealing posts he held in China in a grant application he had made to the US Department of Energy in 2017. The Department of Justice, by then under the Biden administration, dropped the charges in January 2022.
On February 22, 2022, the DOJ ended the China Initiative. Last year, China replaced the Thousand Talents Program with the Qiming Program, which aims to attract overseas scientists aged below 40 to work in China.
America’s ‘soft power’
The Stanford paper was written by a team led by Xie Yu, a Chinese-American sociologist at Princeton University. A Chinese article published in 2017 showed that Xie was a chair professor in Peking University’s Thousand Talents Program at that time.
While highlighting the “reverse brain drain” phenomenon in his paper last year, he told China’s Caijing magazine in an interview in April this year that the US will continue to maintain its leading status in scientific research for many more years with “soft power,” in this case an environment that supports individual creativity and resists authority.
“China now has money and talent but it lacks the cultural soil for original and cutting-edge scientific innovations,” he said. “Chinese culture, which emphasizes respecting authority, is more inclined to doing repetitive and scalable work.”
He said China is far from being able to replicate the United States’ soft power.
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Two top Chinese scientists, one a Nobel laureate and the other a winner of a top computer science prize, have renounced their U.S. citizenship to become citizens of China.
The Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) confirmed this week that Yang Chen Ning, 94, who shared the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1957, and Andrew Yao (Yao Qizhi), 70, the A.M. Turing Award winner in 2000, were recently inducted into the academy’s ranks as domestic academicians rather than foreign. Both men have been affiliated with Tsinghua University here since 2004.
CAS released a statement confirming the news but offered no further explanation as to why the two had given up their U.S. citizenship. Both men were born in China but established their careers in the United States and retained their naturalized U.S. citizenship even after returning to China. Neither Yang nor Yao could be reached for comment.
Those thousands in USA are not the only scientists China has. millions are inside China without needing to go to USA .