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China Luring Scientists Back Home
blee37 writes "The NY Times reports that China is increasing incentives for Chinese students earning PhDs in the US to return home. One example is a prestigious Princeton microbiologist who returned to become a dean at Tsinghua, the Chinese MIT. In my experience as a grad student, Chinese students were often torn about returning home. The best science and the most intellectually stimulating jobs are in the US. Yet, surely they miss their families and their hometown. As alluded in the article, Chinese science remains far behind, especially because of rampant cronyism in academia as well as government. But, if more Chinese students go back, it could damage the US's technology lead. A large percentage of PhD students in the US are from China. Also, the typical PhD student has their tuition paid for and receives a salary. Does it make sense to invest in their training if they will do their major work elsewhere?"
I lived in China for one year teaching high school students and one thing I noticed in general while students were brilliant at chemistry, maths, physics, etc. when solving text book problems, many seemed to be struggling with coming up with new concepts, and in some cases applying what they learnt into new areas. Many struggled when told 'I want x as the end result' without any explanation of the process to achieve the end result. It seems most of the science study was just pure memorizing of facts and figures. I found the same later on when managing some staff from Asia, although very dedicated and hard working they required additional guidance on what processes to use to achieve a goal. There seemed to be a strong sense of 'copy wherever possible' (why re-create it, if somebody already has?) My students had to do 'school', 'city', and 'provincial exams' The complained the provincial exams 'didn't allow copying' Another instance of this was when a foreign professor in Chinese university was fired when failing students for work that had obviously been copied from another source. I think US / Europe still had lead on creativity which can be an important factor when coming up with new solutions / ideas. Not to say the Chinese can't, and it will be interesting to see how they go, but I don't think the number of PhD's alone will decide whether US or China has technology lead. It will also depend on how much further China restricts internet access as the number of internet sites being blocked continues to increase, it certainly frustrates me that even though I have a large network of friends in China working in technology social networking / YouTube continues to be blocked there, and alternatives to access these sites such as proxies / VPN are illegal - and often if detected are blocked. For my friends in China who have studied overseas and since moved back to China they are constantly complaining about fact sites like facebook,twitter, youtube no longer work.
My experience echoes this - i review for a number of materials science journals and i've noticed a steady increase in the quality of work coming from the chinese universities. Its becoming well written (in english, which is not easy for them i think) and increasingly relevant. I would predict that before long they will need us less than we need them. The only case of blatant cheating (copying and pasting "nano particles" all over a SEM picture) came from india, not china.
I've heard that it's less about wanting to stay in the US, and more about the Chinese government threatening the families of the scientists if they don't come back.
What incentive could they offer for scientists who crave discovery and publication to go and live behind the Great Firewall? They must be sellng it hard.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
I think the whole situation is ironic. Quite often when I hear stories about immigrants with degrees getting jobs in the USA, people go ballistic about how they are stealing Americans' jobs and depressing wages.
When they go back to their home country, people then complain about a brain drain and about how they should make a 'contribution' to the country that educated them (never mind that they paid highly inflated tuition and quite often even their graduate education was paid for by moneys outside of the USA + grad students essentially work for $10 an hour - slave wages).
So they are damned if they do and damned if they don't.
Simple. Give them a good reason to stay. The fact that so many are choosing to return to China is strongly indicative that the US has done something very very wrong in terms of making these students want to remain here. If we want to stay in the lead in terms of scientific research we'd better find a way to up the Chinese government's ante or else we risk getting pwned.
Sigs are too short to say anything truly profound so read the above post instead.
the US exists solely to be the global sugar daddy.
It's kinda implied by the US itself, with the amount of influence it wants to have in the world.
One that hath name thou can not otter
> How does a country recover from such a tremendous brain drain
It's not correct to call that a brain drain from Ethiopia if that country doesn't build any brains itself. These brains are build by the US in the US. They are drained from nowhere.
If certain countries, especially muslim one's, would leave behind their cultural backwardness (trying to violently live Qur'an like 1400 years ago - stupid backwardness !) instead of killing christians or other other-faith-people, students would have real incentives to return to such countries.
So these countries get what they act.
As an international student who had four of my friends having to leave the US for China in 2009 and one a few weeks ago, I have to say that the US does not give graduate-degree carrying international students many options. In the US, my friend was forced to work as a web developer soliciting jobs on craigslist; however, back in China he began an IT consulting company and is currently on his way to doing $100,000+ is revenue at the end of the second quarter. Not bad for a guy that was denied work authorization in the country that trained him and paid him ~25k/yr to work at the prestigious college. It was pretty depressing when we spoke about his options and he is far from alone. I hear stories of masters technology students forced to return home and go into high school education and local banking. In my opinion, this country's policy on work authorization for well-experienced and well educated students – THAT THEY THEMSELVES TRAINED - is the reason for the drain. Not only do I see it as anti-capitalist to not compete for graduate talent regardless of status, but the current policy to prefer, on occasions, less educated and less skilled (but national) sounds more like a social program. Consider that in a world where competition is no longer national, but global. So NO, it makes sense to invest in their training if they will do their major work elsewhere but the US is not allowing them to do their major work within its borders.
It's not only the US that treats its Ph.D. students like that. Here in NL (and I think in most of the rest of Europe as well) it's the same. Besides, in most companies scientists are paid much less than for instance the marketing people.
-- Cheers!
That doesn't have to be the case. When I worked as a Post-Doc in Utrecht, the Netherlands, in 2000, we had a Chinese co-worker who just got his Ph.D. and was working also as a post-doc. He got a letter from the Chinese authorities in which he was invited to come back to China. He was promised a job as a professor at a university there. I don't remember wether he went there to have a look before he moved, but after he moved we got a heartbreaking email from his wife who told us that this so-called 'professorship' didn't exist, and the authorities had given them room to live in a house together with 9(!) other families. This was a big setback for her, being used to the standard of living here in NL. Her husband had a better job here than he had gotten in China. And of course there was no way this poor guy and his family were allowed to come back to the Netherlands. I wouldn't be surprised if this happens a lot with Chinese people who are drawn back to China by their government.
-- Cheers!
It's often not about the knowledge published in the publications, but about the way the scientists do the research. And a publication can make very difficult things seem very easy. You often need the scientists involved in the research to replicate the results.
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If an NSF grant spends $200,000 paying the stipends+tuition of 5 students
Then it's getting a ridiculously good deal. That's $40K/student. A typical PhD in the USA takes at least 5 years, so that's under $10K/student/year, which doesn't even cover stipend or tuition, let alone both.
For reference, the grant that I was on for my PhD was for £500,000 (around $1m at the time) and paid for four PhD students and one research assistant. Including office space, overheads (equipment, infrastructure maintenance, technicians salaries and so on) charged by the university, and my stipend and conference budget, the EPSRC paid around £100,000 per PhD. On top of this, I got an extra £25,000 grant (split between me and my supervisor) for travel, so the total cost to the EPSRC for my PhD was around £112,500.
Producing a PhD student costs around quarter of a million dollars, probably more[1]. The ROI that the funding bodies expect is a greater body of scientists doing research, which increases the amount of tax revenue available by increasing industrial output. If the students are leaving the country, then it's not a particularly good return. That's why it's much harder for students from outside of the EU to get funding for a PhD here.
[1] PhD students are paid more in the UK. When I finished, we got £12,000/year, but it had gone up every year. Unlike the USA, stipends are not taxable, so this is take-home pay and is pretty close to an entry level salary for a graduate after deducting tax and NI. On the flip side, PhDs here only take 3-4 years (in part because we don't need to work or teach while doing them), so the total stipend is probably about the same.
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It's an interesting thought experiment.
If you take a brilliant, highly educated person out of a country with political freedom and put him a politically repressive country, he doesn't stop being brilliant or highly educated. But does it affect his productivity?
I don't think it does. However, the chances of something stupid being done with him and his work is higher. There's a wonderfully ironic example of this from the US Red Scare in the late 40s, when our government engaged in political witch hunts of intellectuals.
Qian Xuesen was a brilliant young rocket scientist, one of the founders of the JPL, one of the key brains behind early US rocketry, and a giant in the field of aerodynamics and jet propulsion theory. When he applied for citizenship in 1949 he was turned down, on fears that he might be Communist. The only evidence: he was Chinese. At one point he was arrested by the FBI for carrying a table of logarithms on a trip outside the US. His security clearance was revoked, making it impossible for him to continue his crucial rocketry work for the US.
Unable to work in the homeland he'd wanted to adopt, Qian would have been forced to move back to China, which would have been delighted to take him back. But this wasn't a case of some low level researcher who might smuggle the crown jewels of America's defense technology out of the country. Qian's brains *were* the crown jewels. High level defense department officials immediately realized this was a horrible mistake. Unfortunately, it wasn't politically possible to back away from that mistake at the height of the Red Scare. Qian was put under house arrest for five years, for no other crime than applying to become an American citizen.
Eventually he was allowed to return to China, which welcomed him with open arms even though he was not a Communist. After several years there the self-fulfilling prophecy came true and Qian joined the party. He was allowed to pursue his work unfettered by political interference, training a new generation of Chinese rocket engineers and advancing Chinese ICBM capabilities by decades. With Qian's help, China went from having no modern domestic rocketry technology to designing and building its own ICBMs in ten years. In fifteen years China was able to put payloads into orbit.
Note the abundant ironies here. The supposedly "free" US government oppresses a brilliant individual, but the supposedly "oppressive" one welcomes him with open arms and lets him do the kind of work he's born to do. The US government, by catering to fear and paranoia, provided a bitter enemy with the ability to strike US soil with nuclear weapons.
You could argue that the secretive, non-democratic government was actually at an advantage here, not having to worry about being re-elected and able to simply squelch any kind of organized public scare mongering by its political enemies. Qian apparently sailed through the Cultural Revolution because he was obviously too valuable to mess with. Too bad the FBI wasn't able to realize that during *our* Cultural Revolution.
That's why in the US the power of the federal judiciary to be a check on the elected branches is so important. If the executive branch, for example, is allowed to define it's own para-judicial system for politically sensitive cases, it *will* screw up, even though it *knows* at the time it's screwing up. Had Qian had been able contest the accusation in a forum that was not charged with political calculation, his clearance would have been restored and citizenship granted, to the enormous benefit of the United States. Instead his destiny was put in the hands of politics, and the politicians *knowingly* caused all the bad things they were ostensibly preventing, just to get through the next elections.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
He actually died 2 months ago... Still, a very sobering story.
In a historical view, the post WWII, and in the longer view, the post industrial revolution era, are anomolous, in that there was an unusual conc of science in the us and western europe; for large swaths of human history, China was the dominant, or at least a co dominant science technology country.
There are still living people who remember when Germany was THE leading science power, and if you were a serious scientitst, you went to Germany to finish your education; people like Willard Gibbs were celebrated precisely because genuwine US science hereos were so rare.
The post WWII period, when our wealth dominated world science, is coming to an end. So, the correct view is not that we are loosing our dominance, but that an unusual situtation, where an unusual amount of science was concentrated in the US, is coming to an end.
That we offer free training at what are still the best universitys in the world, because of the specious theoretical economic arguments infavor of globiliazation (see samuleson) certainly doesn't help the US.
I don't know about physics or chemistry, but life science is a labor intensive field. Right now, I make a pretty good living as a PhD scientist in boston area biotech; how on earth am i going to compete with someone from china, just as smart and well educated, a lot hardworking, and a lot cheaper ?
And this is not theory - it is happening; all of the major pharma and RnD firms (eg, Invitrogen) are setting up shop in china with large numbers of scientists.
One other point, which people outside of life science research may not understand. Life science research - basic science as practiced at our universitys - is almost a pyramid scheme; it is based on the idea that very hardworking, intelligent people willl spend 4-8 years at very low salary (graduate school/postdoc) and the carrot for this low wage job is that you can become an independent researcher - similar to the idea behind interns and residents.
So, every university professor depends, critically, on having a group of graduate students to do the actual work; if you are a prof, you must find young people willing to work long hours at relatively low pay.
The problem is that independent researchers are very exspensive, so most of the people who go into phd programs will wind up trashed - they will not have a career in science, at least not a good paying one.
so a large part of the driver for chinese scientists at our universitys is as cheap labor that is "expendable" - you can send them back to china at the end of their grad work; I emphasize that this is driven by the selfish economic needs of university profs; basically, chinese and indian grad students are guest workers, and the great thing is, you can send them back, so you can get new pools of young, cheap labor.
Thus, in the univeristy community, there is tremendous pressure to maintain the flow, and you have people claiming that there is a "shortage" of scientists; of course, in a free market system, by definition, a shortage means you are not paying enough..
It's hard to see how "having the time of their lives" is a bad thing. Unless the Vietnamese kid ends up engineering/programming something significant in terms of human accomplishment or at least lucrative, he basically wasted his life.
My wife married a US citizen (me) and STILL can't stay. She came to the US originally on a Fulbright grant prior to her graduate studies, which requires that she stay in her home country two years before she is eligible to stay in the US, now that she graduated with her PhD. Due to the instability of the situation, that basically makes her unemployed until we can finally get this "prison sentence" out of the way.
Sometimes they make it tough even when you marry a US citizen...
If you can't find a job with a PhD in Biochemistry in the entire USA, you're not telling the whole story.
Well, I ain't no superstar but there's no scandal either.
And, I suppose in a certain sense, that was part of my point. The top PhDs - they're still going to get faculty positions at Harvard and Yale, so to speak. But "the people" here in the USA are really only willing to pony up to support a few of the Einsteins at the top. So, increasingly those of us who aren't superstars (both American and foreign) are finding better opportunities overseas.
That is, the lack of commitment to scientific research in the USA is causing a brain drain primarily from the bottom rather than from the top. I'm not saying that's wrong - just how it is.
Incidentally, as to why I've struggled to find a job in the USA, I took a couple years off after grad school to do some travelling, help my mom after my father died unexpectedly, and a few other things. I then did a three year stint as a scientific programmer and a year teaching part-time at a community college. So, at the moment, I just don't have the publication record to competitive for tenure track research faculty positions. But, I'm now also out past the 5 years since I did my PhD - so finding post-docs is also difficult.
If I keep doing part-time community college teaching I'll probably eventually land a full time community college gig. But, in the mean time, $30K/year is tough to support a family. Ideally, I'd get a job as a scientific programmer here in the USA paying $50K/year- but those jobs are very competitive. So when I got an offer for $45K/year doing a post-doc over in Asia - I really didn't have any choice but to take it.
And, that's my underlying point: for people like me who aren't superstars, moving out of the USA to pursue opportunities in places like Asia is looking better and better.
There's nothing wrong with moving out the US to find jobs. That's precisely the sort of large geographical moves that are routine for grad students from India and China that allow them to compete on a global stage. It's an entrepreneurial move. That's precisely what America is (was?) all about. No ?