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The libertarian Cato institute points out that the US has been losing international scientists in recent years whereas not only has China gained but so has "non-US OECD" countries. The latter is code for Europe and AU/NZ/CA.
The immediate cause is probably the misguided and arguably racist "China initiative" which essentially led to a witch-hunt against ethnic Chinese people. But I suspect domestic factors in China and Europe are also responsible. Both have been ramping up R&D spending in recent years and visa policies in Europe are often more favorable for researchers than American policies are. Easier to get and easier to stay.
It is no exaggeration to say that most of STEM innovation in US academia is now being carried out by foreign-born people. So this development should worry Americans. I also think many people in the West underestimate how much genuine innovation there is in China. Viewing data from the Nature Index, which tracks elite science production, it isn't clear that China is far behind anymore. If at all. In areas like EV batteries, China is now ahead of the West. Progress in their semiconductor industry has been faster than even many insiders had expected.
I still think the US has a series of unique advantages over its competitors, but falling prey to scare-mongering campaigns and McCarthyite tactics isn't going to capitalise on them.
I had the misfortune of going to grad school. I can hardly exaggerate the sneering contempt for Chinese research papers among American researchers. I've evaluated quite a few Chinese papers since graduating and confirm their general lack of quality and rigor.
I'm pretty blackpilled on Chinese research output. They can't be all wrong, but if you were evaluating research papers a great rule of thumb would be to blindly assume that Chinese papers were all wrong.
This was true ten years ago, but there are a number of fields where they have since mostly closed the gap, especially in biology. Even if their overall hit rate is still much lower, they don't need to match ours to get the same research output, given their population.
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Chinese undergraduates and Masters students are this way, but future scientists in a PhD program usually aren't. If all they cared about was cheating their way to status and money they wouldn't waste five or more years of their life working 80 hour weeks for $20k a year stipends. At worst they're incompetent or untrained, particularly if coming directly from China instead of having spent years in an American university already.
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This is pretty much true. Maybe in a sign of things looking slightly up for them, I did recommend publication for one Chinese paper this year, for the first time ever. It wasn't great, but it wasn't wrong. So, maybe they're starting to trend in the right direction?
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