Humanity loses when nations are at loggerheads
- Progress in science and other human endeavours depends on global collaboration, which has been put in peril by US-China tensions
In 1950, Qian Xuesen, a professor in aeronautics at Caltech, was detained as he tried to leave the US to return to China. A top missile scientist in the US before being caught up in America’s anti-communist “red scare”, he was released in exchange for US pilots captured during the Korean war. Qian would go on to play a key role in developing China’s defence and systems sciences.
In the decades since, many Chinese academics and researchers have engaged in overseas study and research or returned home under far less dramatic conditions.
While the number of such movements ebb and flow with economic and political change, one constant is the fact that humanity benefits more when there is global scientific collaboration. But recent political tensions between China and the US has had a chilling effect on such exchanges.
Last year, the US Department of Justice scrapped the Trump-era “China Initiative” that was criticised for unfairly targeting Chinese academics in the US. But the damage was already done.
A recent Post article quoted one Chinese scientist describing a “glass ceiling” for Asians in the country. The Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development showed that the US lost 896 scientists in 2021 while China gained 3,108 in the same period.
Students, too, are feeling the pressure. The denial rate of F-1 visas, which allow non-US students to remain in the country to study, went up from 15 per cent in 2014 to 35 per cent last year.
At the same time, studying closer to home evidently has become more desirable for mainland Chinese students, who now account for the largest share among the non-local population in Hong Kong’s publicly funded universities. Greater Bay Area development will no doubt raise hopes for budding students in science and technology.
But leaders must realise that one casualty of political tension is a loss of talent the world sorely needs to handle borderless problems such as climate change or to grasp opportunities for humanity that lie beyond our planet.
It is too simplistic to think only of one country’s loss being another’s gain. Progress in science and other human endeavours depends on global collaboration.
