China Expands Research Funding, Luring U.S. Scientists and Students

https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2018/11/27/669645323/china-expands-research-funding-luring-u-s-scientists-and-students

by pseudolus • 8 years ago

228 159 8 years ago

npr.org

Someone1234• 8 years ago

This is fantastic news. Science will eventually benefit all of mankind even if the benefits are initially felt closer to where they're conducted.

I welcome increased science funding regardless of who is doing it, particularly when we're talking about non-military scientific research.

If this makes the US feel competitive and they increase funding state-side then so much the better. We'd all benefit from that too.

Old_Thrashbarg• 8 years ago

I agree. It's also good to have more diversification of science and technology progress. That way if one country gets an anti-science leader, it makes less of a difference to overall human progress.

epberry• 8 years ago

I agree. An international competition over “who can do the best research” is certainly something to welcome.

oatrefer• 8 years ago

Completely agree, hopefully we will see more funding in areas that have been "forgotten" due to recent hype cycles.

citilife2• 8 years ago

I don't really think China is luring too many U.S. scientists... Most of the scientists I know pretty much ignore research out of China, because a large portion of it is just not replicable (and / or lies).

rukittenme• 8 years ago

A problem not unique to China unfortunately...

echevil3• 8 years ago

Well I guess the first step would be luring Chinese scientists currently in US back to China (many of those have US citizenship and would also be counted as US scientists)

JohnJamesRambo2• 8 years ago

I work with lots of Chinese scientists and they say they are never going back. They don't trust Chinese papers or labs at all.

fooker• 8 years ago

Please look at the number of papers from China in top CS conferences. In general, the reviews are double blind, making it as objective as possible at this moment.

Example: https://nips.cc/Conferences/2018/Schedule

citilife2• 8 years ago

Arguably most CS papers / presentations are not replicable because many don't share the data.

TTPrograms• 8 years ago

For those wondering, I just clicked through a few randomly and I only saw ~1/10 from China, and it was fairly applied (i.e. not especially novel research). I'd be interested in a more thorough analysis.

Obi_Juan_Kenobi• 8 years ago

China has been progressing quite quickly considering how young their academic/research institutions are.

A very common path for Chinese scientists is to go to a western university for their doctorate and post-doc, develop a research program, and return to a faculty position in China.

Many Chinese grants include salary for the PI, so an investigator getting multiple grants can earn a lot of money. It's an attractive incentive that appears to be working quite well (from my limited exposure).

As for reliability, there are certainly some issues, but I hesitate to paint with a broad brush. Science is often very discipline-specific in terms of reproducibility, openness of collaboration, funding, etc. etc. There absolutely are fields where the Chinese are quite strong.

sgillen3• 8 years ago

This used to be the case but it is changing rapidly. Especially in Math and CS right now.

tanilama2• 8 years ago

Chinese AI/CS papers are definitely not going to be ignored. They are really strong on that front, for they have a huge domestic industry to sustain such level of researches and there is economical benefit to going after.

azinman2• 8 years ago

I was just at Ubicomp, and I'd say the level of quality coming out of China was lacking (and a lot of universities outside of China to be fair). But only the papers from China raised red flags if their results were real or not...

WhompingWindows• 8 years ago

Ignoring disreputable journals from China is one thing, but I doubt any serious scientist would claim there are not incredible advances coming from that country. In field after field they've shown they can produce amazing scientific work. There is plenty of low-quality work but let's not forget the amazing work too.

asabjorn9• 8 years ago

When I did research and at grad school a large percentage of my peers were either Asian American or Asian, with a large percentage being immigrants from China. As a researcher in the US you spend too much time writing grants and now equity initiatives introduce extra risk in the tenure system for anyone of the wrong identity. I would not underestimate the lure of easy access to grants and a less politicized tenure track system for anyone of Asian or Asian American heritage.

fspeech2• 8 years ago

It is probably true for the proverbial early birds who went to China, but these days grants won't be that easy unless you are established or well-connected. There are also a lot of complaints about "politicized tenure track system".

netheril96• 8 years ago

China's current academic system is mostly a copy of that of the United States, and all of the current reforms are pushing further to be more like the United States. Whatever flaws of American grad school are and will be in China's grad school.

nopinsight• 8 years ago

Most of the scientists I know pretty much ignore research out of China ...

Ranking by the 1% most highly cited papers in math and computing for those published between 2013-2016:

6 of the top 15 universities are in mainland China,

6 USA,

2 Singapore, and

1 Hong Kong.

Tsinghua is at number 1. Singapore also seems to employ a number of researchers from China.

The article does state that MIT still leads in the broader STEM fields, but Tsinghua may soon take over.

“The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (mit) still leads in the top 1% of stem papers, but Mr Marginson says Tsinghua is on track to be “number one in five years or less”.”

https://www.economist.com/china/2018/11/17/tsinghua-universi...

ylem2• 8 years ago

In condensed matter physics, there is a lot of good and original work coming out of top Chinese universities and being published in top journals. Also, for those in the 1000 talents programs, the startup grants that they receive are draw dropping.

ezconnect• 8 years ago

You need to read/speak their language to get the good research materials.

jayalpha3• 8 years ago

Me neither. See here:

https://www.wsj.com/articles/american-professor-notes-narrow...

https://www.chinalawblog.com/2016/09/the-china-stock-option-...

coliveira• 8 years ago

Great news. It is very important that we have as much competition as possible in science. And China, being a rising power, can force western countries to invest more in technology.

thatcat• 8 years ago

Is there a good English translation service for Chinese research?

echevil3• 8 years ago

Unlikely, but most Chinese scientists would still publish their best research in English journals/conferences.

killjoywashere2• 8 years ago

That's true of most scientists from non-English-speaking countries. By the by, there's a market for proofreading those translations (e.g. ThinkScience for the Japanese-to-English market). You won't learn Chinese, but if you're learning Chinese, it might be a good way to see how the Chinese make mistakes going back to English.

JesseAldridge7• 8 years ago

I've been looking into topic modeling lately. It looks like this is the best library for doing that: https://github.com/baidu/Familia

Time to learn Mandarin I guess.

eindiran• 8 years ago

It looks like there are English docs too: https://github.com/baidu/Familia/blob/master/README.EN.md

JesseAldridge7• 8 years ago

Yeah, but they are apparently out of date: https://github.com/baidu/Familia/issues/70

And the pretrained models it ships with are trained against a Mandarin corpus.

bllguo3• 8 years ago

Fascinating. Also in such a situation. What makes Familia the best vs. gensim/NLTK?

JesseAldridge7• 8 years ago

I mainly look at the ratio of stars to open issues. I find this to be a very good heuristic:

http://repoq.com/baidu/Familia/

http://repoq.com/nltk/nltk

http://repoq.com/RaRe-Technologies/gensim

http://repoq.com/lists/natural_language_processing

jorblumesea• 8 years ago

China's policy towards political/ideological freedoms and "luring US academics" seems distinctly at odds. Many in academia are ideologically motivated.

cat199• 8 years ago

but yet, many are ideological marxists with massively capitalist lifestyles.. so perhaps these things aren't so at odds.. :b

seanmcdirmid6• 8 years ago

Well, you know, it’s not like the USA isn’t luring a lot of Chinese researchers and students already.

Speaking as an American who worked as a researcher in China for almost 9 years, China is way late to the “leveraging global talent” game. They should catch up, it’s only natural.

sgillen3• 8 years ago

Seems like it's much easier to leverage global talent when you are leading the research at a global level. This has arguably not been this case for (modern) china until recently.

seanmcdirmid6• 8 years ago

Well, there is also a bit of xenophobia against foreigners that they have to sort out. It manifests in weird ways, like not being able to give foreigner employees options in local companies.

Keep in mind that the number of foreigners in China is about the same as the number of foreigners in Tokyo.

choot• 8 years ago

I wonder when will Russia do the same.

xvilka2• 8 years ago

It doesn't have that much money.

eiaoa4• 8 years ago

This is fantastic news. Science will eventually benefit all of mankind even if the benefits are initially felt closer to where they're conducted.
I welcome increased science funding regardless of who is doing it

Would you say the same about Nazi science? The world depicted in the Man in the High Castle has some very impressive scientific achievements.

The idea that science and knowledge are an unalloyed good to humanity no matter who develops the expertise is a fairy tale. Scientific knowledge and the technical skill that flows from it are weapons. Weapons are tools that can be used for good or ill, so we want them to be in the hands of those who can be (more) trusted to use them for good and out of the hands of those who can be less trusted.

http://www.spiegel.de/international/prison-camps-in-china-th...

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/china-is-creating-co...

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/07/25/magazine/the-lonely-crusa...

jackconnor• 8 years ago

Do you equate the Chinese to nazis? Because that's insane and totally fear-mongering, especially if you think China is evil but other countries would use scientific research for only rainbows and puppies.

eiaoa4• 8 years ago

Do you equate the Chinese to nazis?

No, I emphatically do not. That's the most false and inflammatory misreading of my comment possible. The Chinese people are not villains, full stop.

The point I was making is that political regimes matter when it comes to the desire for progress in science and technology, and the idea that it doesn't is naive. I'm glad the Nazis and the Soviets were technically and scientifically behind the Allies and the West, and I think the world would be better off they had stayed even further behind -- even if that meant that humanity as a whole has its scientific and technical progress retarded for the want of their contributions.

cscurmudgeon2• 8 years ago

Everything is not black and white. There is a spectrum and let us not pretend that China is close to most democratic countries on this scale.

koboll2• 8 years ago

As bad as the US is in many different ways, China is immeasurably worse. A future dominated by a hegemonic China would be a dark world. Little steps like these are helping to contribute to that possibility in 50-100 years.

dang2• 8 years ago

Please don't Godwin already-flameprone threads. That's trolling, whether you intended to or not.

We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18546130 and marked it off-topic.

eiaoa4• 8 years ago

Please don't Godwin already-flameprone threads. That's trolling, whether you intended to or not.

If you weren't aware: Godwin has repealed "Godwin's law":

https://www.washingtonpost.com/posteverything/wp/2015/12/14/...:

If you’re thoughtful about it and show some real awareness of history, go ahead and refer to Hitler or Nazis when you talk about Trump. Or any other politician.

Or any other regime.

My comment was not hyperbolic, as WWII is pretty much the perfect real-world example of the political ramifications of scientific and technological advancement. Far from "benefit[ing] all of mankind even if the benefits are initially felt closer to where they're conducted," if the Nazi's had invented the atom bomb before the allies, mankind would have suffered more than it has.

TangoTrotFox2• 8 years ago

Just to provide some historical context, our space program that ultimately put a man on the moon was largely driven by Nazi science. In particular, Wernher von Braun was a key figure in the design and development of the Nazi's V-2 ICBM, receiving accolades and rewards directly from Hitler himself for his successes. After WW2 he, along with hundreds of other Nazi scientists and engineers, were secretly recruited (see: operation paperclip [1]) to the US where he worked on ballistic missiles before eventually moving onto NASA where he served as the chief architect of the Saturn V that brought us to the moon.

Braun was primarily interested in space travel, but it does lead to a good satirical quote, "I aim at the stars, but sometimes I hit London."

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Paperclip

eiaoa4• 8 years ago

Exactly my point. Science wasn't neutral in WWII, and it's not neutral now. If von Braun hadn't been part of their regime, they may not have had V-weapons. If Hitler hadn't been such an anti-Semite, Jewish scientists may not have fled Europe en masse and instead helped the Nazi's develop the atom bomb.

Back then, if people celebrated and supported Nazi science in the name of an idealistic concept of politically-neutral human scientific advancement, Europe and maybe even America may be subjugated under a Nazi flag.

Everyone who cares about liberal political institutions should hope that authoritarian regimes are scientifically and technologically backwards, and work to keep it that way.

dqpb• 8 years ago

This may not be accurate, but I feel like the US benefited a lot from many foreigners knowing English. This does not seem to be the case for Chinese, though I imagine that will change.

whatshisface• 8 years ago

English is not the easiest language to learn, but Mandarin is among the hardest.

stochastic_monk2• 8 years ago

I’ve heard similar things about English being among the harder languages to learn. I think it depends more on what kind of language you already know.

my_first_acct2• 8 years ago

Because of the difficult writing system (thousands of characters to memorize, rather than a mere 26), Mandarin is unlikely to replace English as a world language.

currymj• 8 years ago

i don't know about this. how much worse, really, are hanzi (which do have a loose structure to them, it's not just brute memorization) than the deranged English spelling system?

if there's anyone who learned both as additional languages I would be interested in hearing.

cauldron2• 8 years ago

And quality of mandarin content is deterioting ever faster these days, thanks to low quality school education, generally shit-tier English translators, and the self-media sensationalism cottage industry that Wechat and Toutiao from Bytedance helped created.

sytelus• 8 years ago

TLDR;

China has started the The Thousand Talent program to recruit professors from all over the world: http://www.1000plan.org/en/. Also, Chinese govt now offering international students scholarships to cover the cost if they enroll: https://www.scholarshipsads.com/china-scholarships/.

DenisM• 8 years ago

Oh my, the name could hardly be more unfortunate as it evokes the "Let a 1000 flowers blossom" campaign.

https://www.phrases.org.uk/meanings/226950.html

umeshunni2• 8 years ago

You mean the "Hundred Flowers campaign"? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hundred_Flowers_Campaign

gowld4• 8 years ago

"1000" is an idiom for "many" in Chinese. it only evokes that to you because "1000" isn't an idiom for "many" in your language.

In English, we'd have a "Million Dollar Talent" program and a Chinese would say it unfortunately evokes "Millon Dollar Baby"

quotemstr4• 8 years ago

Frankly, it's embarrassing how an absolutist regime can create a sense of more on-the-ground intellectual freedom than can a supposedly free country. Socially enforced censorship of painfully obvious facts in the west has gotten out of control, and unless we place limits on our newfound authoritarian impulses, we're going to be out-competed. While it's true that we've been very successful for a long time, success breeds complacency. Objections to things like genetic editing of humans on vague ethical grounds will just leave the advantage with others.

umeshunni2• 8 years ago

socially enforced censorship of painfully obvious facts in the west has gotten out of control

Can you explain?

alabato2• 8 years ago

Are you saying the west should allow human experiments on innocent (to-be-born) humans like in China just to keep the pace ? The right to decide what we do to your body, the right to not serve as guinea pig to experiments that aim to achieve a Nazi-like goal of creating a superior race... These are "vague" ethics? If you were currently dieing because of secondary effects due to an experiment we did on you as an embryo (and that you never needed) maybe you wouldn't find those "vague" ethics so useless.

quotemstr4• 8 years ago

The west performs human experimentation all the time for the sake of validating new drugs and surgical devices. While current standards are, IMHO, too strict, the system more or less works, and few people have serious ethical problems with clinical trials, despite clinical trials being literally human experimentation.

fspeech2• 8 years ago

It is not allowed in China either if you are referring to the recent gene editing experiment. The researcher is widely denounced in China and will likely be in legal trouble.

westiseast• 8 years ago

I don’t think the ethical grounds for objecting to gene editing are vague at all. Taken to logical extremes, the ability to edit out ‘undesirable’ qualities in our descendants should ring alarm bells in anyone - who decides what is undesirable?

There are plenty of practical grounds too. They don’t just turn off the cancer switch - gene editing ‘turns off’ some deep cellular function that is involved in cancer developing. But that function might regulate something else we don’t understand - we don’t yet know the consequences 40,50 or 100 years later of doing that.

quotemstr4• 8 years ago

If you had the option to grant your child the ability to live to 150 in perfect health, and if, experimentally determined, the risk of negative side effects were the same as, say, postponing childbirth by five years, would you withold this advantage from your child, sentencing him or her to a shorter and more miserable life? How could a responsible parent choose to do that?

rm2040• 8 years ago

LOL free smog... come one; come all!

dang2• 8 years ago

Please don't do this here.

askaboutit• 8 years ago

Two easy ways to encourage foreign talent. Put huge investments into English training within the country. Or as they could. Put huge investments into a far simpler language such as Esperanto to create an easier to learn (world) language. Secondly, drop the firewall so that foreign talent and local talent don’t feel so divided.

Karrot_Kream• 8 years ago

China already has a history with Esperanto and has hosted 2 Esperanto World Congresses (http://www.china.org.cn/china/2016-07/26/content_38959660.ht...)

mrobot• 8 years ago

It's good to see a positive article about China. Everything i was seeing in the news seemed so negative and hostile.

asabjorn9• 8 years ago

As a former researcher I am not surprised to see another nation capitalizing on the counter-productive politicization of US science.

I used to be a researcher and writing proposals suddenly started taking up much more time around 2010 to 2013 because each grant became much smaller. Each grant also became more specific in what science you were expected to produce, which essentially made us all contractors for NSF plus DOE and winning a grant was sometimes more about politics than producing excellent scholarship. This pushed a lot of great scientists out of the field.

After I left research radical leftists started a more expansive politicized attack on science that is further politisizing who gets tenure or grants essential to making scientific progress.

- Biology as a subject is the most affected right now [1], because biology shows that there are biological differences that contribute to individuals choices in a way that invalidates the univariant equity doctrine political explanations. Women on average does are as capable as men in the sciences, but they differences in choices increase the more equal the societies are.

- Science as a competence hierarchy is under attack by the equity initiatives [2], making it so that the most important factors for getting grants and tenure is often not competence.

The fact is unfortunately that these programs have been shown to not increase the production of great science [3]. Moreover, these efforts further demoralize and alienate scientists.

We should at this point not be under any doubt that unless we defeat the politicization of science the US will not remain competitive. We should ask ourselves if we want to be equal on a sinking ship or make life better by allowing everyone to compete as individuals regardless of which identity you think they belong to.

[1] https://quillette.com/2018/10/18/trans-activists-campaign-ag... [2] https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2018/04/when-wil... [3] https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2018/04/when-wil...

legionof7• 8 years ago

I don't think biology explains away the gender gap.

asabjorn9• 8 years ago

How do you then explain that the gender gap increase the more equal countries are [1, 2]?

This doesn't mean that one gender is more capable than the other, women actually do as well on average in the sciences as men, but it seems to indicate that the genders does not make the same choices if social or economic limitations are removed. Also, why are the choices women make in countries like Norway inferior to the choices they make in less gender equal countries?

[1] https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2018/02/the-more... [2] https://phys.org/news/2018-10-personality-differences-sexes-...

adrianN2• 8 years ago

Just hinting that biology might explain some of the variation is becoming taboo.

candiodari2• 8 years ago

I think the main reason there is so much opposition is what happens when it does. Then there is no reason to change the laws/policies (because they don't override how humans are built). That means there is no reason for the careers of politicians and activists and no money for the initiatives to fix it. So it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.

In practice, of course, biology explains a large portion of differences between humans, both where it pertains to gender, and where it pertains to race.

There are a few "forbidden truths" for them:

1) That there are in fact biological reasons for some aspects of a gender gap.

2) More general there are reasons for discrimination in certain limited cases (it used to be the case that the law had specific exceptions for diversity regulations. The big example given was "no cripples in the emergency response team in the fire department" (I think you can imagine why). That was a valid discriminatory demand that could be put in job applications)

3) There can be no differences in the source population (because ... well if you calculate it out specifically, then the Bay Area is not racist in hiring at all. But wait ! Why are there soooo few blacks working for the Bay Area tech companies ? Why so many Asians ? Well ... those values are very close to what you'd expect them to be if well-established (but heavily denied) racial differences in intelligence are taking into account and one assumes that when silicon valley invites 10 people to compete for a job, they hire the smartest)

So in order to have "equality", defined as "distribution in the winners of competitions is the same as the distribution of participants" you can't have even tiny differences at all in the population beyond their proportion of the population, otherwise that'll never happen. Unfortunately there's another problem here (see next point)

Of course the whole reason different races exist is to have them be different. I mean from the perspective of evolution, which while it isn't a conscious entity, does have both the means to change humans and a reason to do so (a goal to achieve). This means races/genders don't just differ in skin color, they differ in anything. Obviously the skin is one important difference, but it is just one component of profound differences in energy regulation of the body, which affects nearly everything relating to energy use in the body, which ... even affects brain size. Specifically one big difference between races is how much energy gets dedicated to body temperature maintenance (cooling and warming are different systems, so that's 2 separate things), digestion, muscles/movement, and ... yes ... how much energy gets dedicated to thinking, and even the balance between cortex and neocortex. And if it favors the cortex, that is just not going to help out your chess game. It even affects how big you are on average (of course bigger = everything requires more energy, because the human body is not that different from a robot. Fortunately bigger requires exponentially more energy, so the differences there can't be that big)

4) The effect of average differences on competitions. Specifically, say you have group 1 and group 2, and they compete. Let's assume N(100, 10) distribution. Let's say group 1 has a x% higher average, how often would a one-on-one competition between a member of group 1 and group 2 end in favor of the member of group 1 ? Let's call that value y.

for x = 1%, odds of group 1 winning = 53.01% for x = 2%, odds of group 1 winning = 55.57% for x = 5%, odds of group 1 winning = 64.04% for x = 10%, odds of group 1 winning = 76.08% for x = 20%, odds of group 1 winning = 92.19%

And if you have repeated competitions (you only advance to the next round if you win round 1, and there's N rounds) ... it gets pretty bad pretty rapidly.

So unfortunately competition amplifies small differences in averages. Although this is to be expected, this is why natural selection works.

john_moscow• 8 years ago

We should ask ourselves if we want to be equal on a sinking ship or make life better by allowing everyone to compete as individuals regardless of which identity you think they belong to.

I think, there's a very solid cause behind it. Most of "competing individually" is essentially making different decisions and benefiting/losing from the consequences. Except over the past few decades our society has automated/protocolized those decisions away. We follow rules and documented best practices (or just let a database search figure out the right thing for us) much more than we have to improvise. So the society is looking for alternative planes for people to compete and ironically, due to our sense of compassion, the competition shifted to demonstrating that you suffer more than your peers. I'm afraid, this is also responsible for declining willingness of westerners to make families/raise kids.

asabjorn9• 8 years ago

I think if we were all the same and we could use a few group identities to understand individuals you would be right. However, maybe there is a great deal of variety within us that is not expressed because of the measures applied in the name of compassion and equity. The sta

The equity agenda is inherently a very pessimistic agenda in the same way that communism is pessimistic. It assumes that our current tangible as well as intangible resources is a good approximation of what can be, and I think we over the last 100 years have proven that this is not true.

lifthrasiir3• 8 years ago

On [1], I found that tptacek's commentary [4] was much helpful to shape my own opinion about it. At the very least I believe the Quillette article is inadequate as an example of, say, biology under the leftist attack.

[4] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17949340

asabjorn9• 8 years ago

I think the problem with tptacek's explanation is that it does not address the larger context of how certain topics have become sacred in academia [5], and how breaking or criticising these sacred ideas leads to an outsized reaction. Do you think the reaction was focusing on merits and that it was not an outsized reaction due to someone violating something sacred?

Lets dig more into evidence of suppression of biological research:

How would you then explain the reactions to anyone stating the biological fact that human gender is overwhelmingly bimodal with almost everyone being male/female [1], suppression of research into intelligence [2], or the diversity pledges some candidates now have to write before becoming professors [3].

The grievance studies hoax proved how grievance studies is acting like ideological whitewashing of extreme political ideas that would be unacceptable otherwise [4]. These ideas are used to justify political actions in universities and in culture to suppress sacrilegious ideas [5], and it is a concept of sacred only a small very loud minority of progressives believe in and these comprise 8% of the population [6].

Personally I find the radical leftist explanation of these two incidences unconvincing:

- it seems like the opposition to McKinnon’s paper was argued primarily from a moral angle due to his violation of some progressive sacred principles, and other explanation does not seem to explain the size of the response

- The reaction to the grievance studies hoax was that peer review is flawed and them still claiming that it is fair to use favored political views as a valid criteria of what should be publishing of papers of very poor scholarship. This does not engage with the real very disturbing conclusions of this study, and the fact that their hoax papers in addition to winning prices within grievance studies are also indistinguishable from other scholarship regularly published there.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6phePAZueQw [2] https://jordanbpeterson.com/transcripts/douglas-murray/ [3] https://www.thecollegefix.com/ucla-to-require-diversity-pled... [4] https://areomagazine.com/2018/10/02/academic-grievance-studi... [5] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gatn5ameRr8 [6] https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2018/10/large-majo...

DevX101• 8 years ago

The bigger impact isn't luring U.S. scientists to China. It's keeping top Chinese scientists/students in China. Chinese grad students/postdocs are highly represented at elite U.S. universities. With recent political changes in the U.S. making more difficult for international students to come to the U.S. or at least giving the impression that the U.S. is not as friendly to immigration, enrollment from international students have started to drop in the past 2 years.

https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2018/11/13/new-internati... https://cgsnet.org/first-time-over-decade-international-grad...

r0m4n0• 8 years ago

I am employed by one of the big tech companies in the bay and was recently chosen to interview candidates for our new grad program. I was astonished by how many top of class graduate students we brought into the program that had identical backgrounds. Around 90% had studied in and were from China, usually undergrad there and Ivy League grad school with close to perfect GPAs. If they are keeping their students, I haven’t seen it yet. Will see how it plays out in the near future

AbrahamParangi• 8 years ago

The presence of Chinese students interviewing for your grad program says nothing about the percentage of equivalent performance students who choose to remain in China.

ylem2• 8 years ago

The American Physical Society recently found that international enrollment in graduate physics programs I'd down by around 10%. But, it's uneven. At say Harvard or Stanford, things are probably still fine, but a smaller institutions, it can be much greater. What's worrisome (as an American) is that these trends may not be reversible

shalmanese• 8 years ago

How many of them will still be at your company in 3 years time though? Chinese companies are realizing that students with a little bit of work experience at Western firms are a lot more valuable than new grads (especially because a lot of new grads nowadays are kids of rich parents who couldn't hack it in the Chinese education system).

Smart, ambitious Chinese students are now planning the right new work experiences in the US with an eye towards returning back to China as a junior VP at Tencent or Alibaba when they go back. The way to retain them in the US is to give them the same career opportunities here but a lot of Chinese students are realizing they can climb the ladder a lot faster and further in China and making the rational choice to go back.

jjcc• 8 years ago

I can explain where your astonishing comes form(maybe off topic): there are something to do with how China built the nation yet not quite visible to westerners.

There are many factors. One important factor which amplifies other factors is related to big number theory: quantity is translated into quality. Average Chinese are not quite different from other nationals.(Let's put down controversial conclusion for now) . However China has 1.3 billion people. With such a big number , a small shift of the average on the IQ bell curve doesn't matter. What you have met are a vary small portion of top talent from China. As analogy, you can image a typical top NBA athlete would be black. But with 1.3 billion people there exists a Yao Ming who is not a typical Chinese.

Then why it happened recently? That's related to last 30 years rapid development.But that's invisible part. China not only build road , bridge, bullet train, etc. more importantly which also matches Chinese traditional value: China invest heavily in Education. In 80's (i.e. my generation ) only 5-10% of high school graduate can be accepted by limited universities at the time. But money poured into Education increased year by year incrementally like crazy. Today there are enough universities to provide any qualified students an opportunity for education. The consequence is there's a big change on human capital. This is not limited to what you observed but also in other areas. For example, China is exporting the infrastructure building expertise all over the world. Quite often the builders have to bring whole teams from China because qualified teams are only available there. Those are experienced skill construction workers but not academically competitive students.

The significant increase in human capital is less visible than infrastructure improvement, yet it has a bigger impact

tinyhouse• 8 years ago

The research quality and funding is just one factor. The more important factor is quality of life. Things like air quality and being able to get along without knowing Chinese.

xvilka2• 8 years ago

Air quality improves every year, and cities try to plant as much as trees as possible. What I like - they even plant ivy or similar things to climb highway pylons. It looks very beautiful during the summer.

oh-kumudo2• 8 years ago

Meanwhile Trump is doing everything to convince talents around the globe that US will not let them pass by easily /s

curt15• 8 years ago

How limiting do scientists in China find the Great Firewall?

jayalpha3• 8 years ago

Zero. Because they use VPNs. In fact, most companies in China provide VPNs for their employees. No kidding.

China Expands Research Funding, Luring U.S. Scientists and Students

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