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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 think this overestimates the extent to which top academics are willing to move countries based on money alone. To begin with, top academics almost always could earn more by doing something other than being academics, which should already strongly suggest that there are other important terms in their value functions. Europe has remarkable gaps in academic pay between adjacent and similar countries (I'm aware of Sweden (laughably low) vs. Denmark (quite respectable)), without a corresponding research quality difference being apparent. I myself am an academic who is currently taking a basically voluntary pay cut to be in a European country I had no preexisting ties to rather than staying in the US. Based on my own preferences and those of others I know, the main reasons invoked for going to the US are network effects (everyone else is there, most top conferences are held there), for which money at most seems to take a seeding role (which failed to manifest in my field, resulting in me being where I am for the same networking reasons among others).
You're both dancing around the real issue IMO, which is not salary but research funding. If you offer a professor a million dollar research budget, access to the best students/postdocs and a $75,000 USD salary the vast majority would leap at the opportunity. Besides, there's always the option of commercializing your research and serving on boards and such in the USA.
In aggregate China spends quite a bit on research, but when you look at the actual grant size people are receiving it's quite low. Compare the US situation to Canada; in Canada most labs subsist on a single CIHR grant that awards less than 200k per year, and while the paylines (rates of success) for a single grant are higher, it's very hard to win multiple of the main CIHR grants. In the US, R01s (the bread and butter grant for a research lab) pays 400-500k per year and many people have multiple R01s, program grants, R21s and access to a huge amount of private and philanthropic capital. The same scenario plays out at the postdoc/PhD level; do you want access to that capital to do actual cutting edge work surrounded by the most motivated gunners in the world? Move to the US.
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