Actions have consequences. The combination of a virulent outbreak of Sinophobia and the China targeting of the trade war of Trump 2.0 has unsettled the once tranquil and productive American lives of many leading scientists and researchers of Chinese origin. An exodus back to the Mainland is now under way, with disturbing implications for the United States that can only benefit China.
Hu Ye is just the latest leading scientist to give up a prestigious chaired professorship — Tulane University in his case — and accept an equally, if not more, prestigious position as founding dean of a new school in biomedical engineering at Tsinghua University in Beijing. Hu, holder of numerous patents in nanomedicine and associate editor of the ACS Nano Journal of the American Chemical Society, has been a leader in the research on rapid virus detection. Prior to the announcement of his departure from Tulane, Dr. Hu was openly critical of recent freezes and cuts to NIH funding.
Hu Ye is not alone, hardly an isolated example of what has turned into a most disturbing trend. The table below lists twenty leading scientists and researchers who have given up prestigious positions in the United States to return to well supported opportunities in China. The tabulation, which only covers the post-Nov. 2024 US presidential election period, was compiled through an exhaustive AI-enabled search, cross-checked and verified through independent news accounts from the South China Morning Post.
This list of “Top 20” departures is only the tip of a much bigger iceberg. It includes five leading mathematicians, four leading AI researchers, as well as prominent specialists in cancer and HIV research, neurobiology, semiconductor chip architecture, blockchain, and aerospace design. Tsinghua, the equivalent of China’s MIT, has been the largest recipient of this talent migration, followed by SMART-Shenzhen, and Westlake University, a new private research academy in Hangzhou. In the US, the consolidated campuses of the University of California have taken the biggest hit.
There is no dark secret as to what lies behind this trend. The funding squeeze cited by Hu Ye is a symptom of a much bigger problem. Unprecedented pressure on America’s most prominent research institutions — including many leading universities, the National Institutes of Health (NIH), the National Science Foundation, and the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) — coupled with drastic Federal cutbacks in support for basic research, along with the conspiracy-laden anti-vaccine mindset of the Secretary of Health and Human Services, underscore the worrisome anti-science biases of Trump 2.0.
Moreover, reflecting an intensified US-China trade war, anything related to China has been singled out for special attention. Chapter 17 of the notorious Project 2025 — the blueprint for most of the draconian policies of Trump 2.0 — contains an explicit recommendation for resurrection of the “China Initiative”, an abusive, discriminatory program which unfairly targeted leading US academics of Chinese heritage in Trump 1.0, and was discontinued during the Biden Administration. On-again, off-again threats to the issuance of Chinese visas, has chilled the interest of what had long been the leading segment of America’s foreign student population — India is now in first place; current Chinese student enrollment of around 250,000 is down about one-third from peak levels of 373,00 in 2019. And there is the ever-present specter of the House Select Committee on China, which continues to poison US public opinion through its McCarthyesque hearings and anti-China letter writing campaign.
In this climate of Sinophobia, as I have dubbed it, China has been singled out for causing many of the deep-rooted problems that ail America. This phenomenon actually predates the notorious China-bashing of Donald Trump, drawing on academic work that highlighted to so-called “China Shock” as the major factor driving the US trade deficit and the related carnage in American manufacturing. In my latest book, Accidental Conflict, Chapter 4 (“Bilateral Bluster”) takes issue with this analysis for overlooking the macroeconomic link between subpar US saving and trade deficits, as well as ignoring supply-chain related distortions to bilateral trade data. Needless to say, those are inconvenient annoyances for a nation that has become swept up in a bipartisan outbreak of Sinophobia.
Much of this is, unfortunately, history by now. What’s not history is the intensified anti-science, anti-China campaign that has been glaringly evident in the early days of Trump 2.0. I still travel regularly to China — next week I am going back to Shanghai and Beijing — and have close contact with students and Chinese academics. What they tell me is largely consistent with the facts and narrative above. For Chinese students, a US graduate degree has long been prized as the ultimate. For Chinese academics, the once unparalleled opportunities for collaborative research in America have always been held in the highest esteem. Sadly, that is no longer the case. Hardly surprising in the current climate, students and prominent researchers are now voting with their feet.
This obviously benefits China, especially in boosting the research potential in a nation where the push for indigenous innovation is being driven by outstanding research universities, now turbocharged by prominent Chinese returnees. But I worry more about the costs for the United States. The loss of outstanding Chinese talent is only one aspect of a far more insidious problem. The pressures on basic research, the undermining of the world’s leading culture of higher education, an anti-science, anti-expert backlash, as well as a profound shortfall of domestic saving, are distinct warning signs for America’s future. Sadly, we are too busy celebrating the here and now — namely, the bubble-like AI boom — to take notice.