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Chinese Scientists Have No Choice But To Leave US, Top Mathematician Says (scmp.com) 212

China should focus on developing original technologies and scientific knowledge and leverage the expertise of scientists returning from the United States, according to a top Chinese-American mathematician. From a report: Yau Shing-Tung retired from Harvard University in 2022 to teach at Tsinghua University and help China become a maths powerhouse. He said many ethnic Chinese students had been driven away from the US by discrimination from the government, including accusations of misusing American research funds for China's benefit.

"Chinese scientists have no choice but to leave the US because they work best under a supportive research environment," he said. "This exodus is unfortunate for the US as it could diminish its research capabilities. For China, the return of these scientists means it is gaining top talent, but it also results in weakened ties with the US and a loss of first-hand knowledge of advanced technologies."

An increasing number of leading scientists are leaving the West for Chinese institutions. Yau's maths centre at Tsinghua in Beijing is one example where top foreign mathematicians have been recruited. In a survey of 1,300 US-based scientists of Chinese descent conducted between late 2021 and early 2022, 72 per cent of respondents said they did not feel safe as academic researchers. And 61 per cent said they had thought about leaving the United States for either Asian or non-Asian countries.

Chinese Scientists Have No Choice But To Leave US, Top Mathematician Says

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  • by quenda ( 644621 ) on Tuesday December 10, 2024 @08:56AM (#65003157)

    article is pay-walled, so I'll just lament how SCMP was once know for editorial independence, even when owned by Rupert Murdoch.
    And now it is a mouthpiece for the China Communist Party in Beijing.
    https://www.spiegel.de/interna... [spiegel.de]

    • by Zontar_Thing_From_Ve ( 949321 ) on Tuesday December 10, 2024 @07:37PM (#65004509)

      article is pay-walled, so I'll just lament how SCMP was once know for editorial independence, even when owned by Rupert Murdoch. And now it is a mouthpiece for the China Communist Party in Beijing. https://www.spiegel.de/interna... [spiegel.de]

      I've been a subscriber to SCMP for a few years although I live in the USA and don't love the CCP. I thought it might be useful in terms of investing to get information from there and I've been to Hong Kong a few times. I won't be renewing my subscription when it runs out. It is just a mouthpiece for the CCP now. And as one wise man said within the past year - "Investing in communism is a bad idea". They post a ton of crybaby stuff about how the USA is being so mean to them and everything the CCP does is fantastic and people who don't love the CCP are evil. I've had enough.

  • People will go (Score:5, Insightful)

    by jmccue ( 834797 ) on Tuesday December 10, 2024 @08:57AM (#65003161) Homepage

    People will go were the funds are, it is bad now, wait in a few months when trump takes over. With his war on education, he will hand China many good researchers we have in the US.

    I know a researcher who had a chance to go to another country a few years ago (english speaking country), but they wanted to stay here. From a short talk, looks like a they expect a cut next year from the feds. The only researchers the US cares about are the ones researching how to kill people, all others, too bad.

    So right now seems Yau Shing-Tung is correct.

    • Re: (Score:2, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward

      ..wait in a few months when trump takes over. With his war on education..

      China has more honor students than the United States has students in total. Has for years now. If you think we could ever win a war with China on education, you’re doing the math wrong.

      And our “Ivy League” of political activist degenerate “educators” are about to see the price they pay for prioritizing politics over education. I have no fucking idea why foreigners still find value in even having the name on a diploma. Americans don’t anymore.

      • Re: People will go (Score:5, Insightful)

        by oneiros27 ( 46144 ) on Tuesday December 10, 2024 @09:46AM (#65003277) Homepage

        Honor roll means nothing unless you have a consistent set of rules for how they're allocated. It could simply mean that the school has really low standards. This is why colleges used the SAT and such to try to figure out what the true ability of incoming students were and not just look at class rankings or GPA.

        As best I could tell back when I was in undergrad 25-ish years ago, foreign students were much less concerned about 'academic integrity' rules. They were about even with the frat boys when it came to cheating to pass tests. You might get high grades, but do you really learn anything?

        If that's the way their educational system gets so many honor roll students, I wouldn't be scared of them... but part of the reason that we try to keep the people who came to school here is because there's a good chance that they're now better educated than they'd have otherwise been. And do you want that education being used here or back home?

        In an ideal situation, there were also more efforts to bring them into to culture... so it was a sort of soft power cultural exchange type thing... but instead with all of the blatant racism (especially after 9/11 and the pandemic) we end up with people who are pissed off at Americans and are easier for terrorists to recruit them. And they now have people inside the US who may have access to trade secrets or similar.

        The easiest solution is to not allow people from countries that the US has issues with to even come in the first place... but the universities LOVE those students because it helps them show how diversified they are (they collect countries like kids collect Pokémon) and because those kids typically pay a higher rate, helping to subsidize the in-state students.

        Quite simply, it's not a black-and-white situation. I've seen first-hand corruption from foreign professors (Nabih Bedewi), and was retaliated against by the school when I tried to point out questionable stuff that he was doing in 1995 (years before his arrest: https://www.oig.dot.gov/librar... [dot.gov] )

      • Re:People will go (Score:5, Insightful)

        by MachineShedFred ( 621896 ) on Tuesday December 10, 2024 @01:44PM (#65003905) Journal

        You can't win a war you aren't trying to fight.

        Everyone always laments the quality of our public education system, and then does absolutely nothing about it. Where's the huge funding increases in order to be able to outfit schools with the resources necessary to teach students properly? Where's the funding increases to actually pay teachers to teach, and hire teachers that actually know what the hell they're talking about?

        It's nowhere. Public education has been strangled for 30 years by the purse strings to the point that the best idea our incoming administration has is to completely kill it off at the federal level and let public schools sink while states redirect whatever funding they've got to "voucher" systems to enrich private schools with public funds. And in the meantime, anyone who can't get a voucher or can't afford the private school gets a substandard education that relegates them into shitty jobs and a dream of becoming middle class *someday* at best.

        A lot of politicians learned long ago that if they hamstring education, voters don't have the necessary skills to call them on their bullshit because they don't have the critical thinking capacity to *know* it's bullshit. Fast forward to today, and we get what we got from this last election: electing a guy promising to do things he can't actually do because it's legally or logistically impossible; promising to do things that would cause lasting damage to the economy and global stability - essentially voting against their own interests, while also largely electing members of Congress from the opposite party on the exact same ballot.

        Fixing education fixes so many other downstream problems it's not even funny, but we can't do that because a significant segment of the political class *want* a broken education system because it gives them an advantage.

        • by migos ( 10321981 )
          Yup our appalling K-12 education means that we need to fill our universities with top kids from around the word. These are the people that fuel the next wave of innovation. Anti-intellectual movement is cancer and extremely unpatriotic.
        • Re:People will go (Score:5, Informative)

          by Voyager529 ( 1363959 ) <voyager529 AT yahoo DOT com> on Tuesday December 10, 2024 @05:20PM (#65004335)

          You can't win a war you aren't trying to fight.

          Everyone always laments the quality of our public education system, and then does absolutely nothing about it.

          wait for it...

          Where's the huge funding increases in order to be able to outfit schools with the resources necessary to teach students properly?

          and THERE it is - the go-to argument that is the root of why nobody does anything.

          According to the Department of Education's own statistics [ed.gov], the US was 5th in education spending per-capita in 2019, at roughly $15,500/student/year, roughly 15% more than Germany, Netherlands, or the UK, and 50% more than Japan or Israel.

          Whenever the "do something" folks come around, the solution is ALWAYS "spend more". We've done that. We've done that for decades. We've thrown money at the problem and all we've gotten is a well-funded problem (complaining, of course, that it is not, in fact, well-funded).

          Where's the funding increases to actually pay teachers to teach, and hire teachers that actually know what the hell they're talking about?

          On one hand, the median teacher salary in 2022 nationwide [study.com] was $62,000/year, with the top ten percent of teachers earning six figures. Not neurosurgeon money, but considerably more than minimum wage in most states and districts.

          On the other hand, $15,500/student * 30 students / class = $465,000 / classroom / year. Why the median salary is 13% of the gross revenue of an average sized classroom is beyond me, but if the real concern is teachers' wages, the solution is to increase that percentage, rather than saying that $465,000 isn't enough funding. Even bumping that to 20% would make the median teachers' salary $93,000/year, with $372,000 per classroom still left for the administration to light on fire.

          I would submit for your consideration that spending more money exacerbates the problem, rather than solving it. I would submit that the issue isn't necessarily the quality of teachers, but instead the involvement of parents. Ask all of the teachers you know about what makes their jobs easier, and it's parental involvement and support. Not helicopter parents or pass-my-failing-child-or-else parents, but parents who teach their children at home and help with homework and provide structure for the child that the teacher can leverage. Given the choice between the majority of their students' parents doing that, and an extra $200/month of classroom funding, I'm certain that the majority of teachers would prefer the parental involvement.

          I went to college for IT. While there's a piece-here, piece-there amount of information from the different classes I took, there were two classes that I can say were the most useful of any I took: Cisco/CCNA (understanding TCP/IP is indeed helpful in my daily tasks), and...critical thinking. So yes, funding is helpful (though I submit that there are enough companies who can donate enough surplus gear for a Cisco class if needed), but Critical Thinking is timeless, which we seem to agree upon:

          A lot of politicians learned long ago that if they hamstring education, voters don't have the necessary skills to call them on their bullshit because they don't have the critical thinking capacity to *know* it's bullshit.

          The ability to break down a problem into its fundamentals and rebuild it one brick at a time until things are sorted is what enables me to work with systems I haven't used before. It enables me to figure out the problem that different users are trying to convey, even if they don't have the technical vocabulary to describe it. It enables me to ascertain whether described solutions have a good probability of working, or if they're AI-generated slop that will just waste time. And despite it being the most useful

    • People will go were the funds are, it is bad now, wait in a few months when trump takes over. With his war on education, he will hand China many good researchers we have in the US.

      This is true. People go where the money is. But personal compensation is far more important than funds for the actual research, like for equipment. However, it depends on the type of research. Many types of research, like math, don't require expensive equipment.

      In Silicon Valley, AI research has a lot of Chinese researchers, and these are Chinese from China weren't born in the US. In the last few years, this has been increasing and not decreasing.

      The Chinese researchers are smart. They realize that personal

    • by King_TJ ( 85913 )

      Hey, you know what? Our education system in America has become such a joke, it needs a "war" on it. I don't care if it's started by a clueless idiot like Trump or somebody else -- but time to tear it down and rebuild/rethink it, regardless.

      We've got endless stories of grade schools, middle schools and high schools with sex scandals with teachers and students. We've got people graduating who don't even have a 4th. grade reading level. Our colleges are more worried about pushing agendas with courses like "Wo

  • by redmid17 ( 1217076 ) on Tuesday December 10, 2024 @08:57AM (#65003163)
    There is a god damn good reason why Chinese researchers and engineers are being examined closely for this shit. China has been stealing IP And technology from western country's for god damn decades:

    https://www.bbc.com/news/world... [bbc.com] - Industrial espionage: How China sneaks out America's technology secrets

    https://www.chemistryworld.com... [chemistryworld.com] - Theft of universities’ secrets fuels US crackdown on Chinese talent programmes

    https://foreignaffairs.house.g... [house.gov] - Theft of American intellectual property (IP) is a principal irritant in the U.S.-China trade relationship. China leverages its entire legal and regulatory system to coerce technology transfer or steal IP.

    https://www.fbi.gov/news/testi... [fbi.gov] - Securing the U.S. Research Enterprise from China's Talent Recruitment Plans While mere participation in a talent plan is not illegal, investigations by the FBI and our partner agencies have revealed that participants are often incentivized to transfer to China the research they conduct in the United States, as well as other proprietary information to which they can gain access, and remain a significant threat to the United States.

    https://cset.georgetown.edu/ar... [georgetown.edu] - Engineer Who Fled Charges of Stealing Chip Technology in US Now Thrives in China

    https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr... [justice.gov] - Chinese National Sentenced for Stealing Trade Secrets Worth $1 Billion

    And this is a cursory google search plus a few things I already had in my small American brain. It's blatant, usually illegal, and has been spreading my entire life.
    • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

      by DMDx86 ( 17373 )

      The problem is that it's resulted in many unwarranted and unfounded accusations made. Careers have been upended because of the unfounded claims towards Chinese nationals.

      America likes to gloat about how we're better than everyone else and that we have all this due process and equal justice for all but this has shown it to be a farce.

      • The problem is that it's resulted in many unwarranted and unfounded accusations made. Careers have been upended because of the unfounded claims towards Chinese nationals.

        True, but sadly unavoidable.

        If China was not such an aggressive and antagonistic country that is in active opposition to the US and our interests....this would not happen.

        Any Chinese national is suspect....I mean, it makes no sense to eyeball Swedish students as those that are stealing and feeding information back to the Chinese, does it

    • Fun Story (Score:5, Insightful)

      by JBMcB ( 73720 ) on Tuesday December 10, 2024 @09:48AM (#65003285)

      I worked for a company that built electronic gadgets for a few years. A team of engineers flew over to China to tour a few contract manufacturers to build one of the gadgets. When touring a state-run manufacturer, one of my co-workers ran back to the conference room to grab his phone, and caught two employees of the contract house disassembling and taking pictures of the prototype gadget innards. The workers apologized profusely, and my co-worker grabbed his boss and they left immediately.

      The dumbest part is that the gadget used a completely custom chipset that the contract house wouldn't be able to clone, if that's what they were after.

    • by Hasaf ( 3744357 ) on Tuesday December 10, 2024 @10:04AM (#65003327)
      I lived in China for a bit more than eight years. I came to understand that they really see the types of things listed above as their duty.

      On the other hand, they have trouble understanding why Westerners don't put their country first.

      My work took me to the local PLAF (Peoples Liberation Air Firce) base a lot and I had a lot of meetings with one of the generals there (Don't be too impressed, they made a singer a General). He wanted to understand why the US would let Chinese people into research facilities in the first place. He made the point that, "They are Chinese, you have to know they are spies."

      I tried to explain America's laws about racial discrimination. He didn't buy it at all. He felt that there had to be some underhanded strategy about it that he just didn't understand. It is a different way of thinking.
      • Thank you for a fascinating - if somewhat scary - comment!

      • by fuzznutz ( 789413 ) on Tuesday December 10, 2024 @10:43AM (#65003429)

        I was helping a Chinese industrial engineering prof who had a contract with a Chinese University a few years back. We were trying to connect to the University's VPN though the great firewall of China to get the data for him to run through his code. Nothing worked. He got on the phone with their tech support and translated for me while I worked on my side.

        In the end, they gave up and asked him to just send the source code so they could run it on the far end. He gave them an emphatic no. Afterwards he was laughing about it. He said, "They must think I'm stupid. I'm from there. I know what it's like. Handing them my code guarantees all of China has it."

    • China played the long game like a cold war but with knowledge, the US has finally caught on. Took us long enough. 40 fucking years.
  • by jenningsthecat ( 1525947 ) on Tuesday December 10, 2024 @08:58AM (#65003169)

    From the perspective of a non-USian, it seems that the US is drifting toward totalitarianism. This makes it, in some respects, a little more like Communist China. If the trend continues - and perhaps if Xi Jinping dies and is replaced by somebody more moderate - how long will it be before even non-Chinese academics and researchers are leaving the States for greener pastures in China?

    It's a scary thought, but stranger things have happened...

    • Oh, Gilead's not far off. You'll see.

      Blessed be the fruit!
    • From the perspective of a non-USian,

      It's ok...we STILL go by the time worn, well honored descriptive term "American" when we refer to ourselves as and as most of the world still generally refers to us.

      "USian" is a made up non-term.

      We don't recognize it here....

      Hope this help.

    • by Kiliani ( 816330 ) on Tuesday December 10, 2024 @11:44AM (#65003603)

      It is actually a good canary in the cola mine. Once foreign researchers leave the US in increasing numbers and the number of new arrivals drops alongside (outside from a forced drop by restricting certain nations), it is probably an indication that greener pastures exist elsewhere even if (as is likely) the pay is less. This will be especially true if the nationalities leaving are not the target of ethnic/racial undertones and policies.

      You probably just need to watch the pool of applicants for STEM professorships. If those turn suddenly more sharply white American, it's probably time to leave yourself.

    • At least in China, where everyone is monitored heavily by the government, they will be at home and they know what to expect. Mostly if you don't talk nasty about the government you're safe. In the USA, Chinese nationals are also monitored and controlled by Chinese security services, as well as the US alphabet agencies. If you are pressured into espionage by China, you can go to jail forever in the US. If you just take your brain to China, they're happy to have you contributing to their progress rather than

    • Stopped at the fake term USian. Figured it was another anti-US post.
  • I wouldn't move to the US given a choice, but if it was a choice between China and the US, it's the US I'd pack for, zero question.

    The kind of people who choose China are probably the ones you were justified in keeping an eye on.

    • by Luckyo ( 1726890 ) on Tuesday December 10, 2024 @09:22AM (#65003217)

      Most of these people don't choose PRC. They're forced into returning because CCP holds their remaining family back in PRC as effective hostages. There's a reason why when Chinese elites can get their money out of PRC, they do it, bring entire family along and never look back. One of the greatest competitions of last 30 years has been Chinese elites trying to get their money and families out of China into the West, and CCP trying to squash methods these people use to do that one by one.

      It's likely that one of the reasons for CCP's Hong Kong judicial takeover that fundamentally neutered it as an economic powerhouse is that it was one of the few remaining pathways to get yourself, your money and your family out of PRC and the amount of money and people flowing out was starting to become intolerable for CCP.

    • I wouldn't move to the US given a choice, but if it was a choice between China and the US, it's the US I'd pack for, zero question.

      The kind of people who choose China are probably the ones you were justified in keeping an eye on.

      I agree. But if the current US trends continue, then in twenty years - maybe even ten - I think the choice may be less clear-cut. Especially if Xi shuffles off in the meantime and is replaced by somebody more moderate.

      Hell, if our current Canadian trends continue - well, I still wouldn't choose China. But UK, the Nordic countries, and Down Under are looking better all the time. I quite liked Sweden...

      • Have Australia and the UK stopped shifting right?

        I'm old enough I can just sit it out here and be fine for the rest of my life. It's the youth who should be worried about where old sociopaths with money are pushing things.

      • Hell, if our current Canadian trends continue - well, I still wouldn't choose China. But UK, the Nordic countries, and Down Under are looking better all the time. I quite liked Sweden...

        You keep talking about this....I have to ask, just WTF do you think is going to happen that will in any way impede your life, way of life in the near future?

        What exactly do you think you're going to be deprived of? What exact "rights" or opportunities do you perceive to be disappearing?

        Please, be specific and maybe give

      • Dictatorships tend to become more authoritarian, not less. Whoever takes over for XI will continue and enhance his work.
        When they become less authoritarian and allow opposing viewpoints, the rebellions gain strength fast and the dictators tend to get shuffled off the death. They're all aware of this.
    • Having family there and a native language/culture might make it more compelling for some.
      • Having a good job tends to lessen the issue of being under a totalitarian government.

        Myself, if I could move to anywhere in the world. I think I'd aim for a country that isn't poised to enter into a massive war. Although a US-China or US-Russia conflict is likely to impact just about every corner of the map.

  • ... for the ccp, what's the difference?

  • Wait (Score:5, Insightful)

    by kaatochacha ( 651922 ) on Tuesday December 10, 2024 @12:39PM (#65003739)
    So the guy who taught in the US at a high level university and left to create a "Chinese Maths Powerhouse". Claims the US is unfairly targeting Chinese students because they fear they are "misusing American research funds for China's benefit."
    Seriously? He may be the poster boy for this.
    • Chinese can also freely read published science papers on arxiv and learn from that. Is that a problem? This is how science works. It's a worldwide effort and everyone benefits from it.
      If US would prefer to weaponize it and restrict it to their selected circle of allies, its science is guaranteed to become much weaker than it is now.
      China in is one sixth of the world population, there is no shortage of individual ingenuity. Either you let them contribute there (they already have good universities), or bring

      • by cstacy ( 534252 )

        Chinese can also freely read published science papers on arxiv and learn from that. Is that a problem? This is how science works.

        Reading journals is not how you create the leading edge, and especially not how you industrialize/commercialize that leading edge. You need to be actively involved on a daily basis in the creation of that technology-from-science. Or at least adjacent to it (talking to the principals). The scientists in the labs are the ones who first are able to exploit the science, taking it into the outside world. The lifecycle for critical explotation/adoption is months or years ahead of what outsiders are getting by jus

      • published science papers - and - This is how science works No it is not, since the current problem is all the shit being published to 'Science Journals' that is fabricated or posted just to be published - guess where all that shit is coming from?
  • by groobly ( 6155920 ) on Tuesday December 10, 2024 @02:15PM (#65003965)

    Mathematics does not for 99.999% of the work have anything to do with advanced technology. Well, except for writing papers using TeX.

    To the extent that mathematics is openly published, preferably in English, the US should not be too concerned about Chinese mathematicians leaving, other than the effect on US mathematics students.

    For scientists and engineers, it's a whole 'nother matter.

  • Hmm, ie they won't be able to transfer that high tech USA->China. And this is bad because?

  • We are going to China to prove we did not just come to the USA to work for China ...
  • I find it interesting that every time xenophobia pops up, nothing ends well for the xenophobes. History rhymes.

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