Study: Fear makes Chinese scientists leave US

The trend of US-based Chinese researchers leaving the country for China has accelerated in the last four years, especially in engineering and computer science, and the reason for the exodus is fear of investigation by the US government, according to a study.

In 2021, nearly 1,500 US-based Chinese scientists left American institutions for Chinese institutions. They mostly work in mathematics and physical sciences, life science, and engineering and computer science, according to the report by Asian American Scholar Forum.

The study analyzed more than 2.3 million scientific papers and found a steady increase in the return migration of Chinese-origin scientists from the US back to China.

In 2021, the number of both junior and experienced scholars returning to China increased five times compared with 2010, as the authors dropped US affiliations for Chinese affiliations, said Yu Xie, lead author of the study and a professor of sociology at Princeton University.

"That trend has increased over time and accelerated in recent years. We're losing talent to China for a while, but particularly after the China Initiative," said Xie at a recent webinar discussing the study's findings.

The China Initiative was launched by former US president Donald Trump in 2018 to fight economic espionage. But the government mostly targeted US-based researchers of Chinese origin for "research integrity" issues, such as failure to disclose ties with Chinese institutions on federal grant applications.

The program was heavily criticized for racial profiling by both the scientific community and civil rights advocates. Under pressure, the government dropped the program in February 2022.

So far, about 150 scientists have been investigated, and two dozen of them have been prosecuted with criminal charges under the China Initiative.

The initiative has caused a chilling effect on Chinese researchers in the US. The Asian American Scholar Forum conducted a survey on 1,300 Chinese-origin faculties from December 2021 to March 2022 and found 61 percent of them felt pressure to leave the US, and 42 percent were fearful of conducting research in the country.

Among those fearful of conducting research, researchers in life science, computer science and engineering, and senior faculty are almost twice more fearful than the others, said Xihong Lin, an author of the study and a professor of biostatistics at Harvard University.

"The junior faculty is about 1.7 times more likely considering leaving the US, so that means there is a significant risk of losing young talent," she said.

The survey shows 45 percent of the respondents intended to avoid applying for federal grants, especially in computer science and engineering and from public institutions.

"Those computer science and engineering faculties are more likely to get funding from the industry, so this will affect open science," said Lin.

The research found that fears play a major role in predicting the respondents' intention of moving abroad and avoiding a federal grant application.

About 67 percent of the survey's respondents pointed to fears of "US government investigations into Chinese-origin researchers", and 65 percent cited "anti-Asian hate and violence in the US".

The high percentage of those considering leaving the US is partly attributable to a Chinese-hostile societal environment in the US now, said the report. The data show that 83 percent of the respondents had experienced insults in a non-professional setting in the past year, and experiencing insults of this kind significantly heightened individuals' intention of leaving the US.

One of the most prominent scientists returning to China is Song-Chun Zhu, a computer scientist and the director of the Center for Vision, Cognition, Learning and Autonomy at the University of California, Los Angeles. He now serves as the dean of the Institute for Artificial Intelligence at Peking University.

"For many complicated social, economic and political reasons, many Chinese-born and US-born Chinese Americans today excel in science and constitute a significant part of American science," said Xie.

For example, the biggest group of foreign students receiving PhDs in the US in science and technology, or 40 percent of those students, came from China, and 87 percent of those Chinese students stay in the US after their PhDs, he said.

The US world leadership in science and technology, since the 1920s, has benefited from immigrants, especially Chinese students and researchers, said Xie. "But the China Initiative has changed that," he said.