The drop in 2020 seems to corralate with the Visa Renewal backlog that began during the pandemic. I know a lot of very technically adept Chinese+Indian researchers who ended up taking positions back in top Chinese and Indian Universities+Companies+Govt Labs due to this.
Edit:
Digging deeper, it looks like Nature treats the Chinese Academy of Sciences (the Chinese version of US DoE National Labs) as a single institution.
I'd be curious how the US stacks up if National Lab affiliation was included in the same manner. Lots of R&D done by National Lab researchers are affiliated only with their Lab, not a university.
Also a lot of naturalized American academics can also get Chinese Academy of Sciences affiliation due to the murkiness of Chinese nationality renunciation, so that might muddy it further (eg. If I'm an academic at Harvard University with an affiliation to the CAS, which relationship does the Nature Index treat as the primary?)
Edit 2: from the Nature Index itself
"For authors who are affiliated with more than one institution, the author’s Share is split equally between each institution. The total Share for an institution is calculated by summing the Share for individual affiliated authors."
So, if a researcher at Harvard or MIT or Cal is also cross affiliated with the CAS or Tsinghua, their research output would be split equally, even if the relationship is an adjunct one with one or the other.
This sounds like the same kind of statistical gaming NUS and NTU in Singapore and KAUST in Saudi Arabia are famous for to climb up global university rankings.
> it is very clear that American research is top notch, but other countries have basically caught up.
I agree. The last time we've seen a similar parity in R&D capacity was probably the 1950s-1960s.
That said, a lot of discourse around geopolitical rivalries is kind of stuck in a pre-1990s mindset. Even at its worst, countries with actual military disputes continue to be closely economically connected and (excluding Russia over the past year) we haven't seen the kind of economic decoupling that we saw in the 1970s-90s globally.
So long as nations globally maintain diplomatic contact and continue to be connected via diasporas and economic relations, there is always an off-ramp for political disputes.
P.S. Do NOT quote Russia as a counter example to my final example. Russia has been under severe EU+USA sanctions since 2014. The only difference is that these sanctions did not extend to Belarus until 2022, which was used as a backdoor to maintain EU-Russia economic relations.
I would say that the decoupling has been more from the side of US/Europe than the rest of the world. Asia, Africa and South America are becoming more strongly connected. That's why the Russian sanction didn't work (and won't work in the future).
> Opportunities are quite high in other countries for them to consider American immigration nonsense.
I find it utterly baffling that the US is in a position to easily absorb the best and brightest from other countries, and yet shoots itself in the foot with ridiculously restrictive immigration policies.
Sadly, neither side wants to negotiate. On the Federal Dems side reform on skilled immigration needs to also be lumped with undocumented immigrant reform, and on the Federal GOP side due to some semblance of racism plus opposition to negotiating over undocumented immigration. I sadly speak from experience working on this.
Silver lining, just about every other country sucks as skilled immigration as well. But on the negative side, skilled professionals in Israel+India+PRC+SK+ASEAN increasingly prefer to stay put over being in immigration limbo.
It is so strange. The decline in competitiveness is so obvious.
American cars can't compete with Asian or German cars. No engineers.
American homes aren't built for efficiency. No engineers.
American semiconductor and hardware tech is powered by immigrants. If/When they leave because of backlogged immigration, the companies will see more competition. Already America is resorting to sanctioning Chinese semi companies because American companies can't compete.
American software industry is powered by h1b slaves who can get deported by BS American laws themselves.
America is out of doctors and nurses too.
The only thing America succeeds at is financial engineering and management enriching itself.
Yes, the decline of the US industry is also correlated with the decline of engineering. There are fewer and fewer people interested in becoming engineers, and when it happens it is software engineering and financial engineering as you said (which is great, but not the engineering you need for industrial production).
Well, they used to do it for 70 years. So it not that America didn't fully use its opportunities. It's that other countries caught up to this, while the US thinks it doesn't need to worry about competition.
Shooting yourself in the foot with immigration policy is the default, not the exception.
Roughly speaking, developed countries want to welcome the immigrants who would contribute to the economy and reject the ones who would be a burden. But it's difficult to achieve that with a single set of policies and a single immigration authority. Usually you end up either encouraging or discouraging immigration categorically. Either the culture in the immigration authority leans towards accepting anyone who could plausibly meet the criteria, or it's constantly looking for excuses to reject any application. Most countries tend to choose the latter.
>America just doesn't attract (or retain) the best. Opportunities are quite high in other countries for them to consider American immigration nonsense.
In a survey of scientists from 16 countries <http://spectrum.ieee.org/at-work/tech-careers/the-global-bra...>, the US is the top destination from 13 of the 15 others and the #2 choice from the other two. If you are a Canadian scientist, there is a 16% chance <https://www.reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/comments/37lgxg/the...> that you will move to the US. That's not "16% of all Canadian scientists that move out of the country move to the US". Let me repeat: 16% of all Canadian scientists move to the US. They're also likely to be among the top Canadian scientists, too.
America still brain drains best, issue is really PRC talent production so great post academic reforms that limits of US immigration / global brain drain efforts is losing competitiveness to sheer numbers that stay in PRC.
While Visa renewal and the others mentioned may have been an immediate cause, I wouldn't be surprised by a general downward trend in observed American dominance (all other things remaining the same). The incentives to leave China and come to the US must be shrinking.
> The incentives to leave China and come to the US must be shrinking.
Seems like the opposite from my perspective. Window on a more open China seems to be shrinking fast. What makes you think reasons to leave are shrinking?
You are not well informed. China is opening up and attracting talent from the whole world. The "closing" is just happening to the US because of its policies.
China has been trying for over 10 years to attract talent. Right now everyone is skeptical because of the tech crackdown. Arrests. Lockdowns. Etc. There are more people leaving China than going there.
The so-called tech crackdown only affected some large corporations operating in areas that the government didn't want. A huge amount of money has been invested in several technologies and in research.
Not true, lots of talented people are going to China, specially the young. They're doing a good job of attracting people from the global south. This happens while the USA is making immigration more difficult.
Then why is there an exodus of people immigrating to Canada uk Australia. Increase in purchases of homes in other parts of Asia. Increase in visa applications for America well over pre pandemic levels?
Whose leaving? Folks with black money trying to park abroad because they know CCP can crack down vs safety of parking wealth in western housing where dysfunctional politics and entrenched interests won't go after real estate. Meanwhile actual top tier talent being retained and even returning because more opportunities in PRC than ever. They're the ones pushing PRC up these indexes. Even PRC students who go abroad aren't cream of crop anymore, many just have wealthy enough parents who know their kids won't make it in PRC, aka the bench team. Who still do good enough work to fill up space in US / western institutions.
So the families who are coming up through South America. Who don’t have money. They are the black money folks? The families buying cheap condos in Thailand for 300k to send their parents to live because of freedoms and better quality of life? How’s 300k black money? This is ignoring the high unemployment rate at the moment. I guess with so many people losing their jobs that means there’s lots of opportunities. The foreclosures on homes is an indication there are more jobs right?
If you take any small pocket of the Chinese market, you'll find millions of people. So, even if what you're saying is 100% correct, this doesn't paint a complete picture of the Chinese economy. In aggregate, China is growing faster than other economies and in engineering and scientific terms it is growing much faster.
The CCP often says a lot of things. They spent years telling their citizens that their way is the right way and that India is a failure yet India is growing steadily while Chinas population is crippling, manufacturing is leaving, unemployment is on the raise, people are losing their homes and money.
I don’t understand the mental gymnastics people go through trying to justify and defend China when the people are suffering.
It’s like believing the covid deaths reported by the CCP and ignoring the 100s of videos of days long queues to cremations that are running 24/7 and saying “oh the 1000 fold increase in deaths is not related to covid”.
Indian population growth is hardly indicative of winning. That china’s population is growing and will shrink below 1 billion before stabilizing is a net win for them in the long run if they can weather the fall out of dealing with an aging population. India, on the other hand, while having a lot of kids to do work, will have to find them productive jobs and such, it could act against quality of life getting better.
Your basic picture of what life is like in China is way off.
> They spent years telling their citizens that their way is the right way
The government doesn't have to work very hard to convince people in China of this. Living standards have increased dramatically in a relatively short period of time. People see how much their own lives have improved, and they don't need further convincing.
> yet India is growing steadily while Chinas population is crippling, ...
Living standards in China are far above those in India. This is like comparing the US to Mexico. That's how large the gulf is.
> I don’t understand the mental gymnastics people go through trying to justify and defend China when the people are suffering.
If you go to China, you'll have a hard time convincing people that they're suffering so much. By and large, people do not feel that way, simply because their standard of living has increased so rapidly.
> It’s like believing the covid deaths reported by the CCP and ignoring the 100s of videos of days long queues to cremations
Zero-CoVID was a real policy, and it really did keep the virus almost completely out of China for more than two years. Anyone who lived in China during that time can confirm this for you. It helps to have some actual on-the-ground experience or connections, rather than trying to interpret random videos of crematoria. Nobody I know in China got CoVID at all until December 2022, when the zero-CoVID policy was lifted. Then, they all got it in the space of one month.
LATAM border like <10k, insignificant % when talking about PRC emigration, especially capital flight real estate parkers you were referencing to. Ditto with low double digit PRC buying condos in ASEAN for wintering and having access to international schools because their mediocre kids can't hack it. And again, they’re not the cohorts that matter for articles like this.
>ignoring the high unemployment
High youth unemployment, and no, it's fundementally a symptom of why PRC is improving in scitech and industry. State over capacity is generating like 4-5M STEM a year, 20% means they're finding jobs for 4M STEM and like 6M (out of 8M) undergrads, that's a stupendous amount of skilled talent entering the workforce relative to anyone else. West and folks who wank over PRC unemployment should be shaking that PRC ONLY has 20% youth unemployement. Is there enough job supply to match talent oversupply? No, but there's still a fucking crazy amount of jobs to compete globally, relative to when PRC was producing 2M stem per year with 10% youth unemployment. The net increase in high end opportunities is doubling per year relative to 00-10s. Hence PRC moving up these innovation indexes and supply chain value. Not to mention youth unemployment is only high because high household savings lets a lot of urban youth lounge around for options, which aren't always good, eventually they'll give up and settle, which is why broader unemployment is like 5%. Or quoting unrelated stats like home foreclosures that doesn't shit like science output, you realize US S&E output increased during GFC and other economic downturns when people were losing their houses right.
COVID sort of turned that around a bit: it became more important to go abroad and not get stuck getting locked down in Shanghai or one of China’s top cities. We have to see where things land now that china has abandoned zero COVID.
UCAS ranks just behind Qinghua and PKU, but has 54k post graduates compared to around 18-28K in each of the former. So it is really a lot farther behind those two top institutions than it appears on paper, not as impressive when you realize how much staff they have.
UCAS and USTC are holdovers from the Communist era, when a nation's Academy of Sciences would also include graduate education (eg. In the former Soviet Union).
In the present day, the CAS includes national labs (to use a CN to US comparison), USTC, and UCAS. Being affiliated to CAS doesn't necessarily mean affiliation to UCAS or USTC, hence why you will see researchers from Tsinghua or SJTU affiliated with CAS.
Seems "Academy of Sciences" is a legacy of communist country. IIRC lots of Warsaw pact scientists did their grad program at their respective Academy of Science.
No, this is just expected, China has many more researchers (and will have even more in the future) than the US. Also, US is imposing visa restrictions, while China is attracting talent from other countries. Finally, US is investing only a fraction of what it should do in applied research.
There's no money or prestige for going into academia in the US - quite the opposite, in fact. Unsurprisingly, this is not a winning formula for getting research done.
There are 4X as many Chinese than Americans. All they have to do is be more than 1/4 as productive to overtake the US on a national comparison basis in many areas. Not sure how much it truly matters though. Per capita is more meaningful.
There's roughly comparable English speakers US can draw from on Earth as Mandarin speakers in PRC, around 1B each. US recruiting from world is a dumb meme. Except PRC can retain most of talent since net emigration and US immigration / brain drain specifically can only absorb fraction vs numbers that stay in PRC. Drop in bucket really. The numbers game massively favours PRC right now, beside which PRC aren't even sending predominantly their best anymore. Most of kids going abroad are B tier students who couldn't hack it in PRC system. Unlike before 2010s where best from PRC goes abroad since no opportunity at home. That's different now and largely why PRC climbing all the academic and innovation indexes fast.
The issue is that it’s a world market for top talent, and how many Indian computer scientists are moving to China rather than Europe or the UK? The best in the PRC is usually just the best from the PRC, that isn’t true in the west (the best may not be and often isn’t from the west).
The ~1B English speakers includes Indians, that's a global denominator which includes west and rest. The point is US/west access to talent pool isn't some lopsided 8B vs 1.4B, not everyone is eligible.
Hence if PRC retains domestic best, then PRC has relatively comparable talent pool to draw from as US+west. The trend will favour English base effect over time. Also important to distinguish that it's not just about getting only best, US has had skilled shortage for years, their immigration system doesn't absorb enough talent, vs PRC gets to retain huge % of over produced talent to the point of youth unemployment meme. But that means positions gets filled as PRC ramps up or expands in scitech sectors.
> Hence if PRC retains domestic best, then PRC has relatively comparable talent pool to draw from as US+west.
If that were true, why do we keep getting so many good PRC computer scientists in the states? When I was working in China, we lost of a lot of great candidates to Google or Facebook in the USA. China's net emigration rate is still very positive, and that's not mostly migrant workers and people on Chinese restaurant visas.
PRC's lack of access to worldwide talent is a problem, since they aren't exactly keeping their best either. They pay better for software positions than Taiwan and Japan, or even Korea, and they can leverage that, at least.
That's why I conditioned it with "if", it's a trend in progress. Opportunities are still great abroad, especially in SV. But part of this is due to past generations being very drainable due to English proficiency previously emphasised in curriculum to increase knowledge transfer from abroad. Sending talent abroad who may come back (trend increasing) and learning academic lingua franca was a good strategy. But in the last few years we see PRC moving away from English, project trend forward 5-10 years that means generations without previous levels of English fluency has much less chance of "best" being drained away due to lack of ability to integrate in western knowledge ecosystem while domestic ecosystem sufficient to retain and grow talent. If many/most of the top papers in X field are written in Chinese, less need to learn or even publish in English to stay competitive, and indeed language may become a competitive moat. I don't see many in western institutions trying to learn Chinese to stay competitive, and even hiring Chinese may become an issue.
This is already happening. Yes some good/great talent are and will continue to be drained to SV / west, but they're unlikely to be best, unlike in the past where the state deliberately sent best abroad. Some of them are top tier, but being so + not fluent are increasingly common. Same reason we get lots of "good" PRC students manning tier1 academic labs in the west. It's symptom of generating overabundance of talent. Even 20 years ago, many of the PRC students in tier1 labs I knew weren't really top 1% or even 5% students. They're smart enough for the western institutions and their family can afford to send them abroad. But many will admit much smarter folks stayed in PRC because they didn’t have resources to leave. The result of that is reports like this.
Wasn't until the last decade that domestic opportunities have exploded, still not matching supply of talent generation or compensation of the west, but enough that linguistically / culturally severing ability to integrate abroad will start to affect talent drain. Ultimately, PRC's lack of access to world wide talent is a disadvantage, but I don’t think it's * that * significant. Going forward, I anticipate and see signs of PRC language policies increasingly reducing the west's ability to brain drain, and they're already not draining overwhelmingly the best like pre 00s. Hence IMO indigenous talent pool at PRC scale will be enough. That may still be 100,000s of talent emigrating per year, but it's a single digit percentage and if it ever comes to it, sanctions / exit VISAs / bans on working in unfriendly countries just like US/TW block their semi engineers from working in PRC.
The other point I want to emphasize is quantity matters as well. Quality is limited if (western) immigration caps still result to 5-6 digit technical talent shortage, still need tons of B tier bodies doing the grunt work. That's where PRC has advantage, IMO oversupply of talent better than undersupply.
> but they're unlikely to be best, unlike in the past where the state deliberately sent best abroad.
I don't see that happening for a long time. Very few, if any, kids are turning down MIT to go to Tsinghua instead, and once they are abroad in the states to study, if they are in STEM (ignoring the non-STEM kids who go because they have money), they aren't going to come back unless they get access to some crazy resources. What we settled for in our Beijing Research lab, at least, were some under the radar talent with PhDs from Zhongshan universities, very good people, but even the Tsinghua PhD student (who isn't as good as the PhD undergrad) would go abroad even in the late 2010s.
The lack of worldwide talent hurts China in terms of practices and tech culture. It isn't just access to a wider talent pool, but cultural nuances don't really gets ingrained since you get your workers in the west from a wide variety of countries. China is also becoming less liberal, not more, and that can't help either in terms of retaining talent (under Xi, there are real risks to staying and raising your family in china vs abroad, and there is no end to Xi's rule in sight, things could get really messy without a planned peaceful transition of power). Finally, China's housing bubble has no end in sight. You think a million dollar town home in Seattle is expensive? Try 1.5 million for a two bedroom apartment in Beijing! Unless you can make ALOT more money in Beijing, why not work in Seattle instead? At least you can buy a house.
China is going to do OK with all of this, but I don't think they going to thrive as much as you think they are. They have a lot of big challenges coming up in the next decade.
There are more Tsinghua / C9 calibre students who don't have the language proficiency or resources or adventurousness to go to MIT / abroad. Some may later chose to emigrate abroad, as they do now after making decent money, but my conversations with diaspora and their C9 kids is more and more are choosing to stay, simply because QoL and culture in PRC is at point where emigrating is harder decision unless you get high income jobs in select industries (like software engineering) vs 10/20 years ago. As for why not work in Seattle and live in a big house vs BJ shitbox? Hard to argue with that since IMO BJ kind of sucks, but there's plenty of much nicer modern cities in PRC to stick it out. Plenty of Chinese visit their friends in the west and don't care much for it, others really like having big houses and easy driving and slow living. But outside of a few tier1 western cities, wes feels more and more "backwater" vs PRC. Yes many still leave, net migration at 0.25/100k last few years vs 0.3/100k in 2010s, so ~350-400k, but what might have been double digit percentage of annual tertiary talent getting drained relative to talent production 10-20 years ago vs low single digit today. The quantity and quality of talent being retained is magnitude greater than before.
>thrive / illiberalism / big challenges
IMO above is why PRC is going to thrive because regardless of the domestic environment, the vast majority of talent simply can't leave - barring massive changes in western immigration schemes, particularly US, but that's unlikely to happen especially with respect to PRC nationals. But more broadly, on the topic of "culture", JP/SKR/TW had plenty of time to acclimate to the salaryman grind and QoL squeeze, their productivity is only going to stall and decline because they're already relatively developed and can't/won't be able replace talent at parity of loss. But their strategy worked fine for hard tech, meanwhile PRC 996 worked fine for soft tech, enough that it needed to be cracked down. Now consider PRC has 25% skilled workforce vs 60-80% of advanced economies, that's like another 2-4x Japan's worth of talent potential being spammed at 7-8M tertiary talent production per year that disproportionately bias STEM/techinical - simply far too many to be meaningfully brain drained.
And it's not like PRC or the west hasn't been going through their own host of social ills, but US S&T and innovation sectors were still growing during the GFC when the banks were foreclosing homes on the bottom quartiles. Meanwhile PRC climbed up the value chain and these S&T/innovation indexes amidst all the covid and real estate drama. That’s “thriving” in terms of building comprehensive power and it’s doing so under what folks deem terrible conditions, i.e. it’s the default momentum of upskilling millions of people per year and throwing them into the grind. Sure one can argue benchmarking against potential that's doing ok, but vs peers it's closer to thriving.
I think all the fixation on the “human condition” narrative is overstated, at the end of the day East Asian Tigers aren’t built on 40 hour work weeks. They’re built from hammering skilled human capital 200% harder than privileged west for 10% competitive advantage, and at PRC scale, that’s really enough for next several decades. Or more TLDR I think factors will enable to PRC as a country can thrive even if QoL does not.
I agree. Nevertheless I’d love to see the USA spend more on research. Many highly skilled people get PhDs here with the hopes of doing academic research but end up having to leave due to lack of opportunities.
Maybe the current state is optimal. Those talented people often go on to work in industry after all. But how to decide if it’s optimal?
Maybe not per capita yet but eventually could be more than 4x - PRC / East Asian academia bias towards hard science. PRC generating roughly OECD combined in STEM @ ~5M per year. Last rough figure was 15M total STEM a few years ago, wouldn't be surprised if PRC on trend to hit 80-100M by 2050 which will be truely absurd amount. Like west memeing about PRC 20% youth unemployment but that's at least 4M skilled labourers entering workforce per year.
Our best and brightest can make more money with FANG or banking induary than contributing to science. My wife with a PhD in Chemistry from a prestigious university started her own unrelated business due to lack of jobs and avoiding the slog of doing post doc.
This would all naturally catch up with us.
The US revolves around capitalism. Make it more financially rewarding to contribute to science and we'll again be #1 in Nature.
Also, we can shift away from a culture and polity that worships Mammon. Generally speaking, people simply go with the grain of the culture, regardless of whether that grain is crooked or straight. If the culture reduces life to economics and makes consumerism its religion, then yeah, you'll see lots of people who would have chosen less lucrative paths choose work that pays more. What's worrying about finance and FANG pulling in a good chunk of the STEM majors is that finance is not a productive sector, and arguably, FANG isn't really all that productive either, certainly not relative to the economic bias. You need sectors like finance, of course, because they are the way capital is allocated toward productive labor, but the only way unproductive or marginally productive sectors can make this much money without funding and investing in productive industry is through usury. Usury is the ruin of empires.
Agree about usury and all (I think mortgages should probably be illegal), but is consumerism really a big driver of high earners continuing to focus on high earning as opposed to more altruistic research? I feel like keeping up with the Jones’ maxes out at a level that, while much higher than the median income, is not that high among the incomes of geniuses wasting their potential at tech companies. The treadmill feels much much much more about status and future freedom than about consumption itself (granted some consumption is status signaling in nature).
Yes, when I did my PhD it was quite difficult to live with a post-doc income. I imagine what it must be nowadays. Most people in science are now being driven to other fields just to have a decent life.
And capitalism revolves around comparative advantage.
Because American professionals expect higher salaries than their peers in most other countries, they can only be competitive with sufficient institutional or educational advantages. If American universities and research institutes no longer have those advantages, they start losing their competitiveness. Either their productivity suffers, because they have to pay more for the same research output, or they can't attract domestic talent, because the opportunity cost of going to the academia is higher in the US than elsewhere. Relying permanently on foreign talent may work, if the rest of the society accepts it.
Research is an activity dominated by labor costs. Capitalism favors doing such activities in the cheapest places where they can be done well enough.
> "when measured on “simple bibliometrics like productivity and citations, China has outperformed expectations”. She adds, however, that it still “significantly trails” behind other nations “in its capacity to absorb and apply knowledge”"
> "The thing that differentiates the United States from China is the depth of US capability across the board, whatever the field might be."
Looking at high level numbers like citations is the cope. For instance, an individual researcher can have very high h-index scores while it would give no indication the relative merit of another researcher who has h-index score 1/100 of the original. The numbers are so context dependent as to become meaningless in almost all comparisons.
Congrats to the Chinese, that's how we maintain a healthy competition. People in USA should take this as a sign they need to step up their game and invest more in science.
Keep in mind this is lagging indicator of 00s PRC academic reforms where PRC institution building and adding millions more talent into academia. There's been magnitude increase in talent generation, ~5m STEM per year for last several years or roughly OECD combined that's making their way through pipeline while tertiary system continues to expand and improve. I surmise these indexes will get increasingly lopsided going forward.
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[ 3.7 ms ] story [ 134 ms ] thread> between 2018 and 2020, Chinese research comprised more of the top 1% of the most frequently cited papers than did US research.
Edit:
Digging deeper, it looks like Nature treats the Chinese Academy of Sciences (the Chinese version of US DoE National Labs) as a single institution.
I'd be curious how the US stacks up if National Lab affiliation was included in the same manner. Lots of R&D done by National Lab researchers are affiliated only with their Lab, not a university.
Also a lot of naturalized American academics can also get Chinese Academy of Sciences affiliation due to the murkiness of Chinese nationality renunciation, so that might muddy it further (eg. If I'm an academic at Harvard University with an affiliation to the CAS, which relationship does the Nature Index treat as the primary?)
Edit 2: from the Nature Index itself
"For authors who are affiliated with more than one institution, the author’s Share is split equally between each institution. The total Share for an institution is calculated by summing the Share for individual affiliated authors."
So, if a researcher at Harvard or MIT or Cal is also cross affiliated with the CAS or Tsinghua, their research output would be split equally, even if the relationship is an adjunct one with one or the other.
This sounds like the same kind of statistical gaming NUS and NTU in Singapore and KAUST in Saudi Arabia are famous for to climb up global university rankings.
America just doesn't attract (or retain) the best. Opportunities are quite high in other countries for them to consider American immigration nonsense.
I agree. The last time we've seen a similar parity in R&D capacity was probably the 1950s-1960s.
That said, a lot of discourse around geopolitical rivalries is kind of stuck in a pre-1990s mindset. Even at its worst, countries with actual military disputes continue to be closely economically connected and (excluding Russia over the past year) we haven't seen the kind of economic decoupling that we saw in the 1970s-90s globally.
So long as nations globally maintain diplomatic contact and continue to be connected via diasporas and economic relations, there is always an off-ramp for political disputes.
P.S. Do NOT quote Russia as a counter example to my final example. Russia has been under severe EU+USA sanctions since 2014. The only difference is that these sanctions did not extend to Belarus until 2022, which was used as a backdoor to maintain EU-Russia economic relations.
I find it utterly baffling that the US is in a position to easily absorb the best and brightest from other countries, and yet shoots itself in the foot with ridiculously restrictive immigration policies.
Sadly, neither side wants to negotiate. On the Federal Dems side reform on skilled immigration needs to also be lumped with undocumented immigrant reform, and on the Federal GOP side due to some semblance of racism plus opposition to negotiating over undocumented immigration. I sadly speak from experience working on this.
Silver lining, just about every other country sucks as skilled immigration as well. But on the negative side, skilled professionals in Israel+India+PRC+SK+ASEAN increasingly prefer to stay put over being in immigration limbo.
[0] - https://www.politico.com/story/2013/12/nancy-pelosi-immigrat...
American cars can't compete with Asian or German cars. No engineers.
American homes aren't built for efficiency. No engineers.
American semiconductor and hardware tech is powered by immigrants. If/When they leave because of backlogged immigration, the companies will see more competition. Already America is resorting to sanctioning Chinese semi companies because American companies can't compete.
American software industry is powered by h1b slaves who can get deported by BS American laws themselves.
America is out of doctors and nurses too.
The only thing America succeeds at is financial engineering and management enriching itself.
Baffling!
Roughly speaking, developed countries want to welcome the immigrants who would contribute to the economy and reject the ones who would be a burden. But it's difficult to achieve that with a single set of policies and a single immigration authority. Usually you end up either encouraging or discouraging immigration categorically. Either the culture in the immigration authority leans towards accepting anyone who could plausibly meet the criteria, or it's constantly looking for excuses to reject any application. Most countries tend to choose the latter.
In a survey of scientists from 16 countries <http://spectrum.ieee.org/at-work/tech-careers/the-global-bra...>, the US is the top destination from 13 of the 15 others and the #2 choice from the other two. If you are a Canadian scientist, there is a 16% chance <https://www.reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/comments/37lgxg/the...> that you will move to the US. That's not "16% of all Canadian scientists that move out of the country move to the US". Let me repeat: 16% of all Canadian scientists move to the US. They're also likely to be among the top Canadian scientists, too.
Seems like the opposite from my perspective. Window on a more open China seems to be shrinking fast. What makes you think reasons to leave are shrinking?
A lot of the labor issues in China are impacting those with lackluster qualifications.
There are still plenty of opportunities for those with world class qualifications and experience.
I don’t understand the mental gymnastics people go through trying to justify and defend China when the people are suffering.
It’s like believing the covid deaths reported by the CCP and ignoring the 100s of videos of days long queues to cremations that are running 24/7 and saying “oh the 1000 fold increase in deaths is not related to covid”.
> They spent years telling their citizens that their way is the right way
The government doesn't have to work very hard to convince people in China of this. Living standards have increased dramatically in a relatively short period of time. People see how much their own lives have improved, and they don't need further convincing.
> yet India is growing steadily while Chinas population is crippling, ...
Living standards in China are far above those in India. This is like comparing the US to Mexico. That's how large the gulf is.
> I don’t understand the mental gymnastics people go through trying to justify and defend China when the people are suffering.
If you go to China, you'll have a hard time convincing people that they're suffering so much. By and large, people do not feel that way, simply because their standard of living has increased so rapidly.
> It’s like believing the covid deaths reported by the CCP and ignoring the 100s of videos of days long queues to cremations
Zero-CoVID was a real policy, and it really did keep the virus almost completely out of China for more than two years. Anyone who lived in China during that time can confirm this for you. It helps to have some actual on-the-ground experience or connections, rather than trying to interpret random videos of crematoria. Nobody I know in China got CoVID at all until December 2022, when the zero-CoVID policy was lifted. Then, they all got it in the space of one month.
>ignoring the high unemployment
High youth unemployment, and no, it's fundementally a symptom of why PRC is improving in scitech and industry. State over capacity is generating like 4-5M STEM a year, 20% means they're finding jobs for 4M STEM and like 6M (out of 8M) undergrads, that's a stupendous amount of skilled talent entering the workforce relative to anyone else. West and folks who wank over PRC unemployment should be shaking that PRC ONLY has 20% youth unemployement. Is there enough job supply to match talent oversupply? No, but there's still a fucking crazy amount of jobs to compete globally, relative to when PRC was producing 2M stem per year with 10% youth unemployment. The net increase in high end opportunities is doubling per year relative to 00-10s. Hence PRC moving up these innovation indexes and supply chain value. Not to mention youth unemployment is only high because high household savings lets a lot of urban youth lounge around for options, which aren't always good, eventually they'll give up and settle, which is why broader unemployment is like 5%. Or quoting unrelated stats like home foreclosures that doesn't shit like science output, you realize US S&E output increased during GFC and other economic downturns when people were losing their houses right.
Chinese gov have affiliated labs like doe national labs
Academy of science has its own graduate school and professor ranks
In the present day, the CAS includes national labs (to use a CN to US comparison), USTC, and UCAS. Being affiliated to CAS doesn't necessarily mean affiliation to UCAS or USTC, hence why you will see researchers from Tsinghua or SJTU affiliated with CAS.
Violence isn't gonna come down unless mental health problem and fun couture changed which is very unlikely to happen.
There's no money or prestige for going into academia in the US - quite the opposite, in fact. Unsurprisingly, this is not a winning formula for getting research done.
Hence if PRC retains domestic best, then PRC has relatively comparable talent pool to draw from as US+west. The trend will favour English base effect over time. Also important to distinguish that it's not just about getting only best, US has had skilled shortage for years, their immigration system doesn't absorb enough talent, vs PRC gets to retain huge % of over produced talent to the point of youth unemployment meme. But that means positions gets filled as PRC ramps up or expands in scitech sectors.
If that were true, why do we keep getting so many good PRC computer scientists in the states? When I was working in China, we lost of a lot of great candidates to Google or Facebook in the USA. China's net emigration rate is still very positive, and that's not mostly migrant workers and people on Chinese restaurant visas.
PRC's lack of access to worldwide talent is a problem, since they aren't exactly keeping their best either. They pay better for software positions than Taiwan and Japan, or even Korea, and they can leverage that, at least.
This is already happening. Yes some good/great talent are and will continue to be drained to SV / west, but they're unlikely to be best, unlike in the past where the state deliberately sent best abroad. Some of them are top tier, but being so + not fluent are increasingly common. Same reason we get lots of "good" PRC students manning tier1 academic labs in the west. It's symptom of generating overabundance of talent. Even 20 years ago, many of the PRC students in tier1 labs I knew weren't really top 1% or even 5% students. They're smart enough for the western institutions and their family can afford to send them abroad. But many will admit much smarter folks stayed in PRC because they didn’t have resources to leave. The result of that is reports like this.
Wasn't until the last decade that domestic opportunities have exploded, still not matching supply of talent generation or compensation of the west, but enough that linguistically / culturally severing ability to integrate abroad will start to affect talent drain. Ultimately, PRC's lack of access to world wide talent is a disadvantage, but I don’t think it's * that * significant. Going forward, I anticipate and see signs of PRC language policies increasingly reducing the west's ability to brain drain, and they're already not draining overwhelmingly the best like pre 00s. Hence IMO indigenous talent pool at PRC scale will be enough. That may still be 100,000s of talent emigrating per year, but it's a single digit percentage and if it ever comes to it, sanctions / exit VISAs / bans on working in unfriendly countries just like US/TW block their semi engineers from working in PRC.
The other point I want to emphasize is quantity matters as well. Quality is limited if (western) immigration caps still result to 5-6 digit technical talent shortage, still need tons of B tier bodies doing the grunt work. That's where PRC has advantage, IMO oversupply of talent better than undersupply.
I don't see that happening for a long time. Very few, if any, kids are turning down MIT to go to Tsinghua instead, and once they are abroad in the states to study, if they are in STEM (ignoring the non-STEM kids who go because they have money), they aren't going to come back unless they get access to some crazy resources. What we settled for in our Beijing Research lab, at least, were some under the radar talent with PhDs from Zhongshan universities, very good people, but even the Tsinghua PhD student (who isn't as good as the PhD undergrad) would go abroad even in the late 2010s.
The lack of worldwide talent hurts China in terms of practices and tech culture. It isn't just access to a wider talent pool, but cultural nuances don't really gets ingrained since you get your workers in the west from a wide variety of countries. China is also becoming less liberal, not more, and that can't help either in terms of retaining talent (under Xi, there are real risks to staying and raising your family in china vs abroad, and there is no end to Xi's rule in sight, things could get really messy without a planned peaceful transition of power). Finally, China's housing bubble has no end in sight. You think a million dollar town home in Seattle is expensive? Try 1.5 million for a two bedroom apartment in Beijing! Unless you can make ALOT more money in Beijing, why not work in Seattle instead? At least you can buy a house.
China is going to do OK with all of this, but I don't think they going to thrive as much as you think they are. They have a lot of big challenges coming up in the next decade.
>thrive / illiberalism / big challenges
IMO above is why PRC is going to thrive because regardless of the domestic environment, the vast majority of talent simply can't leave - barring massive changes in western immigration schemes, particularly US, but that's unlikely to happen especially with respect to PRC nationals. But more broadly, on the topic of "culture", JP/SKR/TW had plenty of time to acclimate to the salaryman grind and QoL squeeze, their productivity is only going to stall and decline because they're already relatively developed and can't/won't be able replace talent at parity of loss. But their strategy worked fine for hard tech, meanwhile PRC 996 worked fine for soft tech, enough that it needed to be cracked down. Now consider PRC has 25% skilled workforce vs 60-80% of advanced economies, that's like another 2-4x Japan's worth of talent potential being spammed at 7-8M tertiary talent production per year that disproportionately bias STEM/techinical - simply far too many to be meaningfully brain drained.
And it's not like PRC or the west hasn't been going through their own host of social ills, but US S&T and innovation sectors were still growing during the GFC when the banks were foreclosing homes on the bottom quartiles. Meanwhile PRC climbed up the value chain and these S&T/innovation indexes amidst all the covid and real estate drama. That’s “thriving” in terms of building comprehensive power and it’s doing so under what folks deem terrible conditions, i.e. it’s the default momentum of upskilling millions of people per year and throwing them into the grind. Sure one can argue benchmarking against potential that's doing ok, but vs peers it's closer to thriving.
I think all the fixation on the “human condition” narrative is overstated, at the end of the day East Asian Tigers aren’t built on 40 hour work weeks. They’re built from hammering skilled human capital 200% harder than privileged west for 10% competitive advantage, and at PRC scale, that’s really enough for next several decades. Or more TLDR I think factors will enable to PRC as a country can thrive even if QoL does not.
Maybe the current state is optimal. Those talented people often go on to work in industry after all. But how to decide if it’s optimal?
Does that mean that there are also 4X scientists in China? Ratios of total population and particular segments can be very much different.
>"Per capita is more meaningful."
Also questionable as science is totally different product than say how many parts employee produces per month.
This would all naturally catch up with us.
The US revolves around capitalism. Make it more financially rewarding to contribute to science and we'll again be #1 in Nature.
Because American professionals expect higher salaries than their peers in most other countries, they can only be competitive with sufficient institutional or educational advantages. If American universities and research institutes no longer have those advantages, they start losing their competitiveness. Either their productivity suffers, because they have to pay more for the same research output, or they can't attract domestic talent, because the opportunity cost of going to the academia is higher in the US than elsewhere. Relying permanently on foreign talent may work, if the rest of the society accepts it.
Research is an activity dominated by labor costs. Capitalism favors doing such activities in the cheapest places where they can be done well enough.
> "The thing that differentiates the United States from China is the depth of US capability across the board, whatever the field might be."
these sound like some cope