My Take | Trump has been Beijing’s most effective science talent recruiter
Many fear the supposedly defunct ‘China Initiative’ – a racial profiling programme targeting Chinese-born scientists in the US – could return with a vengeance
Renowned mathematician Yau Shing-Tung has just said out loud what many China watchers have known for a long time.
Yau was speaking at an academic event at Lingnan University in Hong Kong.
The return of Donald Trump to the White House threatens a worsening of an already hostile research climate in the United States for scientists and engineers of Chinese heritage. Many are leaving or planning to leave the US for positions abroad, and China has been the obvious choice. It is, after all, rolling out the red carpet by offering top salaries and grants along with state-of-the-art laboratories.
If this is the kind of tech war Washington plans on waging against China, I think its outcome will be fairly predictable.
For more than two decades, China was the main supplier of young talent to the US. After obtaining advanced degrees, most China-born, US-trained scientists tended to stay, thereby providing a large talent pool for the country.
