CHINESE-BORN brainiacs have been at the forefront of innovation in America. Yang Chen-Ning, a Nobel-prizewinning physicist who died in October, was one such. But a mixture of pushes (such as the hostility of Donald Trump’s administration to all sorts of newcomers) and pulls (including China’s lavish support for science and tech) mean many are now following the path Yang took later in life: he returned to China in his 80s to teach at Tsinghua University in Beijing. Today, a host of Chinese youngsters are also choosing not to go to America to study at all.
These shifts have been under way since Mr Trump’s first administration and are now striking among three overlapping groups: students, scientists and tech types. They stand to harm both America’s best universities and its most innovative firms. Chinese-born boffins have long made up the largest group of foreign researchers in America. An exodus just now, as the world’s two largest economies are locked in bitter trade conflict, will erode one of America’s biggest advantages in its technological rivalry with China: its ability to lure and keep superstars.
Not that the Trump administration appears to see it that way. In May Marco Rubio, America’s secretary of state, said America would “aggressively revoke visas for Chinese students”. (Mr Trump later said he wanted 600,000 more of them in a distinctly confusing addition to the debate.) In September a congressional committee released a report titled “From PhD to PLA”, calling for tighter restrictions on Chinese students, citing their possible future links with China’s armed forces. That month Mr Trump proposed a charge of $100,000 on new applications for H1-B visas, which are heavily used by tech companies to bring skilled foreign workers to America. Chinese and Indians will be among the hardest hit.
Look first at the shift among students. The number of Chinese youngsters studying in America grew six-fold between 2000 and 2019, when it peaked at more than 372,000. China accounted for more than a third of all international students in America. Since then their numbers have dropped by nearly 30%. Covid-19 was one reason, but the American government’s hostility is another. Studying in America now seems like an expensive bet on Trumpian temperance.
At the same time the standing of America’s universities has deteriorated in China, says Yingyi Ma, a sociologist at Syracuse University in New York. Ten years ago haigui, the Chinese term for returnees with degrees obtained abroad, were seen as “winners of the rat race” who would get plum jobs in China. (The daughter of Xi Jinping, China’s leader, went to Harvard in 2010.) That advantage has diminished. Chinese bosses now think domestic graduates are just as good, if not better, than American-educated ones, says Dr Ma. With a glut of college graduates at home, many Chinese graduates in America find themselves unwanted in either place. Younger students, especially from the best schools, now opt instead to stay in China.
A similar trend is apparent among scientists. Nearly 20,000 of them with Chinese origins (judged by their names) departed America between 2010 and 2021, according to research by Yu Xie, a sociologist at Princeton University in New Jersey. They have been leaving for China at a faster rate since 2018 (see chart). That is the year that the Trump administration launched its China Initiative. This aimed to crack down on alleged technology theft by targeting researchers for suspected fraud, conspiracy or espionage. Nine in ten of the defendants were ethnically Chinese.
There are egregious examples of such skulduggery. Just last month a Chinese-American was convicted of stealing fibre-laser technology with military applications from a joint project between Corning, an American glassmaker, and DARPA, a research arm of America’s Department of War, after being encouraged to do so by the Chinese government. In 2020 the FBI director at the time, Christopher Wray, called Chinese spying and secrets-stealing “the greatest long-term threat” to America’s intellectual property and to its economic zing. Even so, the heavy-handed rollout of the China Initiative (in which only one-quarter of the cases ended in convictions) spread fear. The Justice Department shut down the programme in 2022.
China has benefited from all this. Two-thirds of Chinese scientists leaving America went to China in 2021, compared with less than half in 2010. It is increasingly clear why. China’s spending on research and development has increased 16-fold, in real terms, since the start of the century. And the country has long-established programmes that shower returnee scientists with goodies. It knows that where one renowned boffin leads, others often follow. Shi Yigong, a biophysicist, and Rao Yi, a neurologist, who both formerly lived in America, have become co-founders of a new research university in Hangzhou in China’s Zhejiang province. It has recruited more than 200 academics.
Tech is the next field where America should worry about a Chinese exodus, especially in critical industries like artificial intelligence. Silicon Valley is still full of Chinese superstars, because America remains the top destination for AI talent worldwide. But China is the top source of that talent. Nearly half of the best AI researchers and nearly 40% of the ones working in America are from China (based on where they obtained their undergraduate degrees), according to a 2022 report by the Paulson Institute, an American think-tank.
Many major American firms rely on Chinese employees’ expertise. Most members of an 11-person team hired to turbocharge a new “Superintelligence Lab”, revealed in June by Meta, a social-media titan, were born in China, for example, according to reporting by the New York Times. And tensions in the US-China relationship can spill over. One star Chinese researcher, Yao Shunyu, moved to Google DeepMind, a big AI lab, this summer after his former employer, Anthropic, another such lab, implied that China was an “adversarial nation”. He said that was “~40% of the reason” for the move.
America remains far ahead as the world’s leading AI hub, but China is making steady gains. Nearly 80% of non-American AI researchers who complete PhDs in America tend to stay there to work, but the share who went instead to China afterwards grew from 4% in 2019 to 8% in 2022. This remains a small proportion, but the concern is that it heralds a more damaging trend. Dylan Zhao, a postdoctoral fellow at the University of California, Berkeley who also studied at Zhejiang University in Hangzhou, reckons the pipeline of Chinese talent coming to America is shrinking and that Chinese universities and companies are producing more hefty AI research.
One Chinese employee of an American AI firm, who studied at both Zhejiang and Stanford, says several of his peers dropped out of their American PhDs to work for Chinese AI companies. He stays because he thinks that America’s innovation is superior. But he is unsure whether his company will enter him into the expensive H1-B visa lottery next year, and worries about whether America will turn against even the top AI specialists from China in the future. “People can feel the water and the water is getting cold,” he explains. The more America freezes out such types, the warmer the welcome they will receive in China. ■
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