My Take | If PhDs from the West want some love, they should come to China

In the 1950s, thanks to McCarthyism, the United States government first persecuted then deported the brilliant Chinese scientist Qian Xuesen to Maoist China. Often described as the father of the nation’s missile programme, Zhou Enlai called his deportation America’s greatest gift to the Chinese people.

Now, history is repeating itself, perhaps even on a larger scale. The China Initiative, launched by former US president Donald Trump to hunt for industrial espionage and intellectual property theft, has been a total failure but has scared off a whole generation of ethnic Chinese scientists and engineers working in the US.

According to a new study jointly conducted by Harvard and Princeton universities, and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, at least 1,400 US-based ethnic Chinese scientists switched their affiliations last year from American to Chinese institutions. That’s a lot of brain power!

And that’s not just one survey. Last year, a poll by researchers at the University of Arizona and the Committee of 100, a non-partisan group of influential Chinese-Americans, found four in 10 scientists of ethnic Chinese origins considered leaving the US out of fear about American government surveillance and persecution.

China’s Thousand Talents Plan, which aims to recruit overseas scientific talent, has been criticised as ineffective and its results lacklustre. But then, America’s paranoia and racism have come to the rescue and are helping to send some of its best brains to the country. That’s not all, though.

Western governments may worry about Chinese intellectual property theft, but they are doing a terrible job treating their own young scientists who will produce the next generation of technologies and scientific breakthroughs. In a word, many of these future scientific leaders are not even paid a living wage, but are exploited as cheap intellectual labourers such as teaching and research assistants.