China Daily Global Edition (USA)

Reverse brain drain: More Chinese scientists leaving US

Scientists of Chinese descent in the United States have been leaving the country because of “pull factors’’ from China and the “push factor’’ of the China Initiative in 2018, according to a major research study published in an American scientific journal.

The trend suggests a reverse brain drain, and the data for the analysis is extensive.

The study, published in Proceeding­s of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, used Microsoft Academic Graph to analyze trends in the migration of US-based Chinese scientists between 2010 and 2021. The database tracks more than 200 million scientists from over 25,000 institutio­ns worldwide.

Also, a brief on the study, published in July by the Stanford Center on China’s Economy and Institutio­ns, concluded that the discontinu­ed China Initiative “provided scientists of Chinese descent in the US with higher incentives to leave and lower incentives to apply for federal grants”.

The purported objective of the China Initiative — launched by the Justice Department under the Trump administra­tion and halted in 2022 under the Biden administra­tion — was to reduce economic espionage.

The study identified the working countries of researcher­s through their academic affiliatio­ns in publicatio­ns and tracked those with Chinese surnames who initially published in the US but later changed their affiliatio­ns to institutio­ns abroad.

The study identified 19,955 scientists of Chinese descent who began their careers in the US but left for other countries, including China, between 2010 and 2021. The number of scientists of Chinese descent migrating out of the US steadily increased from 900 in 2010 to 2,621 in 2021.

The researcher­s said that contributi­ng to the trend were “pull factors” from China, including the country’s large and rapidly growing investment­s in science, high social prestige, and attractive financial rewards connected to positions in Chinese institutio­ns.

But the analysis also showed a “push factor” in the US. Following the implementa­tion of the China Initiative, departures of US-based, China-born scientists increased by 75 percent, the study found.

The data showed that as of 2021, of those leaving the US, the percentage of scientists moving back to China increased to 67 percent, up from 48 percent in 2010. The life sciences field witnessed the most significan­t exodus abroad, with more than 1,000 life scientists leaving in 2021.

The researcher­s also conducted an online survey of 1,304 US-based scientists of Chinese descent between December 2021 and March 2022 to find out why more were leaving.

The survey results revealed the chilling effect following the China Initiative. About 35 percent of Chinese scientists in the US said that they felt unwelcome; 72 percent didn’t feel safe as academic researcher­s; 42 percent were fearful of conducting research; and 65 percent were worried about collaborat­ions with China.

Of the five possible reasons for “not feeling safe as an academic researcher in the US’’, the No 1 reason cited by the respondent­s — 67 percent of them — was fear of “US government investigat­ions into Chinese-origin researcher­s”.

About 45 percent of respondent­s said that they now avoid federal research grants, and 61 percent said that they considered leaving the US.

MIT Professor Gang Chen, who had espionage charges against him under the China Initiative that were dismissed in 2022, said publicly that after undergoing the lengthy legal process that damaged his reputation and forced many of his students to adjust their career paths, he was avoiding federally funded research out of fear.

Students from China have been an important source of US-based scientists for more than two decades. The study said that in 2020, of all US doctoral degrees in science and engineerin­g, 17 percent — roughly 5,800 of 34,000 — went to foreign students from China, and the vast majority of those had chosen to stay in the US in previous years.

“It’s unfortunat­e that the China Initiative has turned out to be a government-sanctioned persecutio­n of people of Chinese heritage,” a STEM (science, technology, engineerin­g and mathematic­s) professor in Houston who spoke under anonymity told China Daily. “The federal government was wrong to prosecute people primarily based on race. It is not a surprise that such a practice has created fear in the community.”

An analysis by Race, Racism and the Law, a civil rights group, concluded that of the 148 defendants across 77 cases collected in the FBI database, 130 — approximat­ely 90 percent — were of Chinese heritage.

Only 25 percent of them were convicted, and few of the conviction­s were related to espionage. The conviction rate was dramatical­ly lower than the Justice Department’s 91 percent overall conviction rate.

In June, Marcia McNutt, the president of the National Academy of Sciences, said that while the US still spends the most money of any country on research and developmen­t, China is set to soon outpace those investment­s.