A Princeton nuclear physicist. A mechanical engineer who helped NASA explore manufacturing in space. A US National Institutes of Health neurobiologist. Celebrated mathematicians. And over half a dozen AI experts. The list of research talent leaving the US to work in China is glittering – and growing.
Errrr, you can’t pay me enough to work in China. Why go from an county starting to go towards authoritarianism to a country that is ALREADY authoritarianism. China is def not the lesser of the two evils.
This is relevant for immigrants who are trying to escape poverty, almost with no future in their own countries either for their personal or professional aspirations. I am not a China fan, but when you look at countries around the world, many of which are very poor and underdeveloped but with lots of brilliant, hard-working people with dreams and potential, they would rather go to a place where they have at least some stability, predicted living and working conditions, and a future, rather than to a place where one doesn’t know whether the potential future mayor of New York City, born and brought up in the USA and hence of course a citizen who happens to be the son of a world-famous filmmaker and a well-known academic, will actually be deported or not. I mean that’s a real possibility at this point - let that sink in. (I am not even going for more extreme examples)
I wish things were better, and I wish we didn’t live in a world where China, yes, China – of all the countries, might become a viable alternative for people from the developing or underdeveloped world compared to the USA.
Yeah, but there are other and much better places to go than China. The world doesn’t consist of only the US and China.
Is it really gaining on someone if the other racer ahead of you stops turns around and runs back toward you going the wrong way? I mean I guess that’s gaining but it doesn’t feel like the right word.
There are always isolated exceptions, but the idea to move from the US to China because the US is becoming more and more autocratic is baseless. China has been a dictatorship for decades, and it doesn’t get better because the US getting worse.
The list of researchers and others professionals leaving the US for Canada, Australia, Europe, and other democratic states is much longer. This article doesn’t make sense.
As an addition, a report citing a Chinese state-controlled media:
Chinese professionals eye Europe as US visa uncertainty grows
According to the South China Morning Post, recent uncertainty over the U.S. H-1B visa program has led many Chinese professionals to consider leaving the United States for Europe. Confusion followed a U.S. government proposal to introduce a US$100,000 application fee for H-1B visas. Although later clarified to apply only to new visas, the announcement triggered panic among skilled workers and their families.
You mean that when US starts blocking visa and cutting science budget, scientists look for another place?
I mean… it’s not exactly an upgrade.
I don’t know. China is smart enough to realize that a country needs science and scientists should be enabled to do science. There will be censorship in some areas, but there’s not a government that’s just hostile to science in general and trying to shut it down because of some idiotically regressive dogma, as in the USA. Going to a country that considers it a good thing, and worth investing in, to lead the world in science would be an upgrade.
That’s right. It’s an upgrade by virtue of supplying the material means to do large amounts of science. To provide the education people need, give them labs, tools and materials to work with. All of us would benefit from those scientific discoveries.
Do they get to bypass the “great firewall”?
I don’t think that’s necessarily the case, but either way the firewall isn’t impregnable if you put your mind to it.
How do you get through the American firewall that blocks American access to sites the government doesn’t like?
VPNs. You do know that that’s a real thing people of multiple states need to do to access pornographic material and circumvent age restriction tech right?
Clearly I’m being to subtle…
Some areas lol. China is the same thing as the US. All government is the same it does not matter where you are, they always turn against their people.
I’m very anti authoritarian and anti statist but this doesn’t always happen. You can’t look at say Burkina Faso with Thomas Sankara at it’s head and Nazi Germany and say they’re the same in how the government treated the people
Kinda is. America is on its way to being as authoritarian as China, just with a Christian bent, which is so much worse.
So much worse than being jailed for talking about democracy? At least in the United States we can all run to a blue state… For now. However, I am curious to see if Trump does anything with his super special banned words.
In terms of getting to do science without harassment, it absolutely is. Now I wouldn’t go myself because I’m basically allergic to authoritarianism, but if I was another “I just wanna make rockets” guy it’d be a pretty tempting offer.
Ummm… In China, prohibited or heavily restricted areas of research include democracy, human rights, Tibet, Xinjiang, Taiwan, Tiananmen, criticism of the Communist Party, censorship circumvention tools, human reproductive cloning, genetic modification of human embryos for reproduction, stem cell work beyond 14 days of embryo development, unapproved clinical stem cell applications, organ transplantation outside regulated systems, unauthorized cryptography, dual-use or national-security technologies, nuclear technology, unrestricted sharing of genomic or health data, foreign collaboration on sensitive datasets, and archaeological or historical research that challenges official state narratives.
Have you ever read the list of words you can’t use when applying for grants in the US? Here’s the list: https://www.forbes.com/sites/brucelee/2025/03/15/these-197-terms-may-trigger-reviews-of-your-nih-nsf-grant-proposals/
Imagine not being able to make research just because it focuses in the wrong topics according to the current government, topics like females, the climate crisis, mental health, racism and inequality.
The Gulf of Mexico being in there is the icing on the cake of some people in this world are too fucking stupid and toxic to be trusted in any kind of position where they’ll have influence over other people’s lives.
What was that list in 2021? 😂
