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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.
If I am a scientist that has an option to work in China or in the US, what would be my incentive for the US? I guess money can be an incentive, but China could match that if they wanted now, they're not poor anymore. Living in a free country and not being subject to the whim of the oppressive fascist regime and having to censor one's speech and scientific inquiry constantly - could be a huge factor. And there was time where the US held a huge advantage on that. But combined air of suspicion (may be in some small part even justified) towards Chinese-born scientists and widely-publicized cases of wrongful prosecution, with the general air of ideological conformity (of a different kind, but similar fervor) in the academia in general, where liking a wrong tweet could get you hunted by the mobs and fired from your job - makes one question, how big is the difference now? Sure, there is some, you won't be jailed yet for saying men can't get pregnant (though many members of Congress are already writing "hate speech" laws which would make it happen), but you can very well be made unable to work as a scientist - the distance is decreasing rapidly, and with increased politicizing of science, one may reasonably conclude that the choice is not between freedom and political control anymore, but between two forms of political control. So, if the US is no longer the shining beacon of freedom on the hill, it comes back to who could offer more. And I imagine, to some people China would be willing to offer more.
On the other hand, by working in the US you get to live in a quirky but very pleasant first world country in which you can generally do whatever you want. By working in China, you get to live in a middle income industrial zone(you will notice that industrial zones in the US are not very popular places to live) under a brutal dictatorship, where the sky is literally blotted out with pollution.
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I'm a scientist working in the US and I got one of these offers to work in China for a ton of money and family and school support. I didn't even consider it except to laugh about it with friends and family.
China sucks, up and down. I am convinced that the people who think that life in China is in anyway as good as life in the US are too young or too poor to know what high quality life in the US is like. My quality of life in China would be so much worse than my quality of life in the US even with all these financial and status inducements. The food sucks. The housing sucks. The culture sucks. Frankly, the people suck too. The best stuff is a bad imitation of western culture. Westerners that go to Shanghai and think its bright and shiny honestly have peasant taste or have never experienced the actual high-quality things that New York has to offer. And despite all the kvetching on here about increased politicalizing of science, soft limits on free speech, and so on, this is basically all negligible and only noticeable because the baseline is so good. I teach at a big progressive university and "cancelling" is basically made up and not something that actually happens, and when it does, the administration clamps down on it hard and the cancellers shut up.
The on-the-ground reality in China, that I hear from Chinese colleagues, is factually and materially a million times worse. This million talents thing, or whatever the latest version is called, is an absurd joke that only attracts the very worst scientists and academics working in the US. You might not know this from pure numbers, but when you look at the mature researchers who go, or the PhD students who go, we are not, as they say, sending our best.
This isn't just US chauvinism, I would 100% consider a similar offer in Korea or Japan or the UK or France or even Hong Kong 10 years ago. China is just uniquely bad in ways I find almost impossible to overstate.
Can you please expand on this because I find it hard to believe but maybe I'm just too online.
Probably nobody gets cancelled because they all know what to say and what not to say and keep their mouths firmly shut.
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I think the truth is somewhere in between.
There are unique advantages and drawbacks to both, but if you are a credible and accredited scientist working in a high-value field such as medicine or AI, I would say the US still offers more money and opportunities. Quality of life is, in both countries, exceptionally dependent on where you go. There are places in both the US and China that I would not want to ever visit, or even pass by, without a heavily armed personal escort that would suffer no repercussions for shooting bystanders.
People is a tossup. I think in America the variance is higher, it's a culture and society that says one thing and does another and lionizes exceptionalism of all sorts. China tends to squash everyone down into the same paste by design.
Food is again, exceptionally dependent on where you go.
I definitely do think the attitude towards foreigners has gotten significantly worse in China over the last decade and a half. 2013 China and 2023 China are, for foreigners, quite different.
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I think these are worth elaboration. It’s not an obvious given.
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It probably sucks to be an average Chinese person, but if you are coming in with a PhD from an American university and are offered a tenured professorship with guaranteed funding and a lab full of peons to order around I don’t think it's so unbelievable that some would take the deal.
While some aspects of the material culture are noticeably worse, the people and food are going to be a plus for any returning Chinese or Chinese-American. You don’t have to walk over human excrement and watch your back at night like you would in California, and if you're in the dating market the women are skinnier and quite fond of foreigners or those who have been abroad.
I'm not sure quite what you mean by "peasant taste," but I don’t really see the point in having a ton of opera houses (or your choice of cultural amenity) if you have a decent chance of getting mugged or shot leaving them as though you were in the prologue to a Batman movie.
Most of the US is not San Francisco.
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That was exactly my reasoning when we decided to leave California. Yes, we have all those museums and operas and ballets, but what is the use of it if we don't want to set the foot in the city they're located in, and if we do, we have to think whether our car will be broken into (the answer is - yes) and whether we will step into poo on the way back to it. Of course, one can say this is still the peasant thinking - real high-quality people have a chaffeur that drives them to a private entrance (or maybe a private helicopter that lands them onto the roof of the opera house? I admittedly too peasant to know such things) and they don't have to experience any of the peasant problems. But I wonder does the sciencing really pay that well for a common scientist?
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Are you Chinese-born? I think the perspective would be different for someone who was born into the culture and somebody who comes from outside. I mean, it is not necessarily one-sided, as I've seen Chinese-born people resenting the culture, and immigrants loving the culture, but I think there's still a difference. For me, it'd take literally millions (many, many of them) to even consider going to China (and I probably won't agree anyway), because I think the whole culture would be so alien for me (and I'm not even a scientist). But for somebody that feels at home in that culture, it may be a different calculation.
You seem to be in a good place. I am not sure though your personal experience covers the whole US - from what I am seeing reported, cancelling is definitely something that happens, at least in some places, though maybe not in the place where you work. Don't get me wrong - I am nowhere near saying US got is as bad as China. Just that US it moving closer to China, and by that losing its relative advantage.
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