Pearls and Irritations

Many fear the supposedly defunct ‘China Initiative’ – a racial profiling programme targeting Chinese-born scientists in the US – could return with a vengeance.

Renowned mathematician Yau Shing-Tung has just said out loud what many China watchers have known for a long time.

“Chinese scientists have no choice but to leave the US because they work best under a supportive research environment,” he said last week. “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.”

Yau was speaking at an academic event at Lingnan University in Hong Kong.

The return of Donald Trump to the White House threatens a worsening of an already hostile research climate in the United States for scientists and engineers of Chinese heritage. Many are leaving or planning to leave the US for positions abroad, and China has been the obvious choice. It is, after all, rolling out the red carpet by offering top salaries and grants along with state-of-the-art laboratories.

If this is the kind of tech war Washington plans on waging against China, I think its outcome will be fairly predictable.

For more than two decades, China was the main supplier of young talent to the US. After obtaining advanced degrees, most China-born, US-trained scientists tended to stay, thereby providing a large talent pool for the country.

But since the launch of the “China Initiative” by the Justice Department and the Federal Bureau of Investigation in 2018 under the first Trump administration, which primarily targeted Chinese researchers, the trend has reversed. Relocating abroad has increased by 75 per cent, with two-thirds of them moving back to China.

According to a survey released in July by the Centre on China’s Economy and Institutions at Stanford University, 61 per cent of scientists of Chinese descent in the US are considering leaving and 45 per cent now avoid applying for federal grants.

That’s perfectly understandable. After all, who needs the extra scrutiny with such grant applications, which may also trigger investigations by bureaucrats and even prosecutors? Your reputation and career, family life and relations with colleagues will be upended with just an announcement of an official probe. You will probably go bankrupt from legal fees defending yourself even when you are innocent if some prosecutors decide to dig through your entire career records just to find something to charge you with.

Consider such prominent Chinese-born researchers Franklin Tao Feng, a former University of Kansas chemical engineer, Gang Chen, a MIT nanotechnologist, and Xi Xiaoxing of Temple University, all of whose egregious criminal cases have been covered in this newspaper as they went through hell and back to beat trumped-up charges against them.

Joe Biden supposedly ended the China Initiative, but Chinese-born researchers have continued to report a hostile and suspicious work atmosphere.

A parallel initiative under the US National Institutes of Health – which has sent warning letters to hundreds of institutions under its auspices requesting that they investigate specific researchers – is actually ongoing.

As of June this year, it had singled out 250 researchers, most of them Chinese or Asian, suspected of failing to disclose work in China that overlapped with their NIH-funded research or broken other rules.

At least 112 scientists have lost their jobs as a result, according to a report in Science, the prestigious peer-reviewed journal.

Back to the Stanford centre. Researchers there used the Microsoft Academic Graph, a huge database that tracks millions of scientists from more than 25,000 institutions from dozens of countries responsible for over 200 million scientific publications through 2021.

Using this data, the authors identified the working countries of researchers through their academic affiliations on publications and tracked those with Chinese surnames who initially published in the US, but later changed their affiliations to institutions abroad.

The data was complemented by an online survey of 1,304 US-based scientists of Chinese descent to understand the impact of the China Initiative on their scientific community.

Between 2005 and 2015, 87 per cent of Chinese-born, non-citizen, new PhDs in science and engineering reported they would stay in the US. However, following the China Initiative in 2018, departures of US-trained, China-born scientists increased by 75 per cent. Of these, about half moved to mainland China and Hong Kong, and the rest to other countries.

In the related survey of 1,304 scientists of Chinese heritage, 35 per cent said they felt unwelcome, 72 per cent did not feel safe as academic researchers, 42 per cent were fearful of conducting federally funded research, 65 per cent worried about collaborations with China, and 86 per cent found it was harder to recruit top international students compared to five years ago.

Of the five possible reasons for “not feeling safe as an academic researcher in the US”, 67 per cent pointed to fears of “US government investigations into Chinese-origin researchers” and 65 per cent cited “anti-Asian hate and violence in the US”.

More than a third, or 37 per cent, feared “my family, friends, or collaborators might be targeted by the US or Chinese government in retaliation for something I say or do”, while 31 per cent said “others might report what I say or do to the US or Chinese government”.

Also 83 per cent said they experienced insults in a non-professional setting the previous year. Men who worked in engineering, computer science and life science, as well as federal grant awardees or senior faculty members, were more likely to feel fearful of conducting research in the US.

Well, just as Yau said: “The US government has shown serious discrimination against Chinese scientists over the past decade. They face significant challenges when applying for research funds from the National Science Foundation, National Institutes of Health and

Department of Defence due to perceptions that they might use American funds to benefit China.

“Many Chinese scientists eager to contribute to the US feel uncomfortable – although they look up to the US as the world’s centre of science and technology. To make matters worse, some have faced accusations from intelligence agencies of stealing confidential information from the US.”

The big bosses in Beijing must be hoping for a stepped-up China Initiative 2.0 with Trump’s return.

Republished from South China Morning Post, Nov, 09, 2024

Share and Enjoy !

SHARE TWEET SHARE COPY EMAIL PRINT