Consider the China Initiative, launched by the Trump administration in November 2018. Its stated goal was to stop the Chinese from stealing American technology and intellectual property. But it was ill-defined from the start: referring to both Chinese hacking of leading companies and to the only tangentially related charge of “Chinese propaganda disseminated on our campuses”. When it was shut down in 2022, officials noted that it was nothing more than a “grouping” of cases “under the China Initiative rubric”. “[This] helped give rise to a harmful perception that the department applies a lower standard to investigate and prosecute criminal conduct related to that country or that we in some way view people with racial, ethnic or familial ties to China differently.”
This wasn’t aided by the fact that the Initiative appeared to lack a competent, sensitive and indeed honest approach. In one case, the FBI admitted to falsifying evidence. In another, the prosecutors admitted to misunderstanding the funding disclosure rules a Chinese-origin scientists was alleged to have broken, and dropped the case. Most of the cases involved scientists, including white Americans, failing to disclose links to China in applications for American funding.
The Initiative left a deep impression on Chinese talent in America, and helped create an atmosphere of hostility that would have been familiar to Qian. One study suggests that significant portions of Chinese-descent American scientists feel unwelcome, unsafe and fearful of conducting research or applying for grants. The American scientific community is not happy about this: articles in science magazines and a growing body of evidence point to the damage it has done to America’s ability to attract and retain precious Chinese scientific talent.
It’s not just Republicans scaring off scholars. The liberal establishment’s insistence on affirmative action for black and Hispanic students has long resulted in discrimination against Asian Americans, who tend to outperform other ethnic groups academically. At Harvard, an internal study estimated that if admissions were based on academic performance alone, the proportion of Asian Americans would double to 43%. It’s a similar story at other Ivy League universities. Some Chinese scientists considering raising a family in America look upon this discrimination and despair.
“There is much at stake in the battle for great minds.”
Is it any surprise then that America is losing Chinese talent? Now, more than ever, brilliant young Chinese scientists who have studied in the US seem to end up going back home. According to one report on Tsinghua University, by many accounts China’s finest, the number of graduates going to the US to continue their studies has plummeted — while the numbers going to Singapore and the UK have risen and remained stable respectively. One study focusing on leading researchers in the field of artificial intelligence concludes that America still receives a net benefit from the Chinese brain drain — but much less so than a few years ago.
Meanwhile, China has gone to great lengths to grow its pool of top scientists. A focus on investment into education, on sponsoring study abroad, on promoting Chinese traditions that encourage intensive schooling, and on providing grants, materiel, sponsorship and prestige to mature scientists via the “Thousand Talents” programme and others like it have paid off. According to one report, analysing the top 10% most highly cited research publications from the past five years in 44 key technology areas, China’s institutions and their scientists are leading the world in 37 of 44 key technology areas such as batteries, synthetic biology, 6G, quantum sensing, and drone swarms. By 2050, according to one estimate, the highly-able STEM (science, technology, engineering and maths) workforce in China could be 10 times larger than in the US and comparable with or larger than the rest of the world combined.
In this context, America’s efforts to limit Chinese companies’ access to high-tech chips have proved futile. Last October, the launch of a new Huawei phone shocked Washington because it contained a chip of a quality that US sanctions were supposed to have rendered unattainable. Starved of American chips, Huawei has had to innovate or perish. It has innovated.
What Washington failed to realise is that Chinese technology theft is no longer the only problem. IP heists have been crucial to China’s rise. But now, the greatest “threat” comes not from copycats but innovators. Washington, however, continues to respond in a way that might have been effective 20 years ago — but may have undesired consequences today. The paradigm of “China stealing our technology” is not a full reflection of the reality; Chinese scientists, working in China and elsewhere, are already among the world’s finest.
All is not lost. Plenty of Chinese scientists still wish to escape Xi Jinping’s oppressive regime and its spiralling nationalism. As the tale of Qian Xuesen shows, there is much at stake in the battle for great minds. For one thing, we should all fear the prospect of great technological might in the hands of a tyrant. Even Nikita Khrushchev wrote of his horror at Chairman Mao making light of nuclear holocaust at a 1957 meeting of Communist leaders in Moscow: “We may lose more than 300 million people. So what? War is war. The years will pass, and we’ll get to work producing more babies than ever before.”
The madness of Mao touched Qian’s life too. These were the days of China’s blossoming missile programme, but also of an evangelical Communist-religious fervour and the Great Leap Forward. By some accounts, Qian took part in Mao’s campaign against flies, rats, sparrows and mosquitos, and was spotted kneeling in an alley near the Institute of Mechanics in Beijing, smashing fly larvae with a spade or screaming and waving a bamboo cane around in order to scare away sparrows. In 1958, he published a series of sermon-like articles in the People’s Daily extolling Maoist themes: “For our scientists — the leaders of the scientific ranks — their responsibility is great. They must be able to mobilise the masses and rely on the masses. But if they are to be able to do this, they must not only resolve to be red, they have to really be red, red all the way through.”
Qian’s writings would become even more disturbing: one article claimed that since the only hard limit on the agricultural productivity of a field is the availability of energy via sunlight, China could boost its food production twentyfold at least. In the eyes of some of his peers, this served as inspiration and justification for Mao’s plan to merge peasant collectives into huge bureaucratic farming units. This programme — combined with an insane initiative to force everyone, Qian and his colleagues included, into operating steel furnaces — led to a famine that killed tens of millions of people.
For a brilliant man to engage in such nonsense is baffling. For a man leading a WMD programme to engage in such nonsense is terrifying. As Qian’s would-be colleague John von Neumann put it: “The combination of physics and politics could render the surface of the earth uninhabitable.” In the era of Chairman Xi, Donald Trump and Taiwan, these are words worth remembering.
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The views expressed here are personal, not those of UKCT.
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