As Trump flip-flops on US academia, China's brightest head back home. Here's why

The Star

7 days ago

This year, Beijing's Tsinghua University is up two spots to be just outside the top 10.
Peking University and Zhejiang University have also moved up the list, climbing to 25th and 45th respectively.
The rankings are the latest list of the Best Global Universities compiled by American media company US News and World Report, which looks at 2,250 top institutions from 105 countries.
The assessment focuses exclusively on the overall academic research and reputations of the universities, weighing up 13 factors, from publications to citation impact.
This year's results show just how far Chinese universities have come in a few short years. In 2018, Tsinghua University was 50th and Peking University 68th, the only two in the top 100. Now they are among 15 Chinese universities in the top 100, with Tsinghua leading the pack at 11th.
It has been a steady rise for Chinese institutions up these kinds of ladders in recent decades, one built on sustained investment in education, students and recruitment of overseas staff.
That brain gain is growing in momentum, as the administration of US President Donald Trump flip-flops on visas for international students and cuts research funding, deterring more of China's best and brightest from study and research in the United States.
The decline in Chinese students heading to the US has been particularly stark over the past five years.
In the 2019-20 academic year, China accounted for the largest group of international students in the United States, with 372,532 crossing the Pacific for further studies. By the 2023-24 school year, that number had fallen to 277,398, a decline of more than a quarter over that period.
So much so that India now sends more students to the US than China.
Similarly, almost 20,000 scientists of Chinese descent left the US for other countries between 2010 and 2021, according to a study by Princeton University sociologist Yu Xie.
The rate jumped after 2018 when the US government launched the 'China Initiative' in what it framed as an effort to uncover 'Chinese economic espionage' threatening US national security.
The China Initiative was launched during Trump's first term and reportedly involved US Department of Justice investigations of thousands of scientists suspected of hiding Chinese connections. Most cases were quickly dropped due to lack of evidence, and the programme was scrapped in 2022 under Trump's successor, Joe Biden.
However, the academic chill between China and the US is still apparent at the institutional level. In January, the University of Michigan ended a two-decade partnership with Shanghai Jiao Tong University over what it said were national security risks.
The University of California, Berkeley, recently announced it was decoupling from the Tsinghua-Berkeley Shenzhen Institute after the US government began investigating millions of undisclosed dollars given to the institute by the Chinese government.
And in September 2024, the Georgia Institute of Technology announced the end of its participation at the China-based Georgia Tech Shenzhen Institute, also due to national security concerns.
The effect could be lasting.
While the most popular American universities – Harvard, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and Stanford – continue to dominate the top spots in the US News university rankings, 'visa challenges and government scrutiny could deter talented Chinese students and researchers from choosing to study in the US in the future', according to Rick Carew, adjunct professor of finance and economics at Fordham University's Gabelli School of Business in New York.
'China-born scholars contribute immensely to academic research in the US. The heightened US-China political tensions have made them a target for scrutiny,' Carew said.
'Generous funding and the opportunity to teach the next generation of top Chinese students in their native language have made offers to return to Chinese universities attractive for some top scholars more interested in conducting research than geopolitics.'
One of the major pull factors for returning to China – the increase in funding – stems from Beijing's efforts to ramp up domestic innovation and development. China is seeking to move up the industrial value chain and is counting on investment in high technology to help get it there. At the National Science and Technology Conference in the capital last year, Chinese President Xi Jinping set a 2035 goal to develop the country's science and technology sectors into world-leading research hubs.
That involves a bigger emphasis on research. According to a report released in March by the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development, China spent more than US$780 billion on research and development in 2023, reaching 96 per cent of US R&D spending, measured in terms of gross domestic expenditure. That compared with just 72 per cent 10 years earlier.
In 2017, China surpassed the US in terms of research output, and since then has generated an increasing number of cited publications, a sign that Chinese research is attracting more attention from the international research community, according to the Springer Nature 2024 China Impact Report.
Xiong Bingqi, dean of the 21st Century Education Research Institute in Beijing, said conditions for researchers had improved over the past five years, with incentives such as higher salaries, better research funding, and benefits like housing subsidies and healthcare.
'The good scientific research environment has attracted a large number of foreign academic talent to teach in China, and the talent attraction policies are also quite helpful,' Xiong said.
Zhejiang University, a cradle of tech start-ups in China, has been on the receiving end of some of the research funding and has attracted notable scientists from the US. That reputation was burnished this year when university engineering graduate Liang Wenfeng made the world sit up with his AI start-up DeepSeek and its cost-effective, open-source and competitive approach to large language models.
Notably, many of the people at DeepSeek were young and educated wholly in China. In an interview with The China Academy, an academic networking hub, Liang said his hiring practice was to pick and nourish fresh young graduates from the very top Chinese universities but with little to no work experience.
Apart from DeepSeek, Zhejiang University graduates have been at the forefront of other innovative tech start-ups such as Deep Robotics, known for specialising in robot dogs and pioneering autonomous inspections of electrical substations and dangerous high-voltage environments. Both companies are part of the 'Six Little Dragons', the Hangzhou-based tech firms whose successes have come to embody China's tech aspirations.
'China produces an estimated 1.4 million engineering graduates each year, providing fresh talent to technology firms like Huawei and BYD competing with Silicon Valley,' Carew said.
'Chinese tech innovation has benefited from a combination of engineering talent, China's advanced manufacturing ecosystem in Zhejiang and Shenzhen, and government policies supporting investment in hard tech industries.'
In addition, US controls on technology exports to China, such as a ban on sales of some advanced chips, introduced in 2022 were supposed to help secure technological leadership, but they ended up costing US companies billions of dollars in market capitalisation while boosting Chinese domestic innovation and self-reliance, according to a 2024 report by the Federal Reserve Bank of New York.
But this has not always been the case. China-US relations, arguably one of the world's most important sets of bilateral ties, boast decades of strategic academic cooperation and competition.
In 1979, the two countries signed the US-China Science and Technology Cooperation Agreement. That agreement was renewed late last year after much delay and some changes but the extension signalled a continued willingness to cooperate.
And in May, Beijing's Tsinghua University opened four new residential colleges aimed at developing talent in science, engineering and AI, with one of them designed specifically for international students. The colleges were part of a global strategy launched in 2021 to boost worldwide competitiveness.
'Promoting internationalisation is an important part of efforts by Chinese universities to enhance their competitiveness,' Xiong said.
Attracting American students to China is one of Xi's goals. In late 2023, Xi said China was ready to invite 50,000 young Americans to China on exchange and study programmes in the next five years to increase exchanges between the two peoples, especially between the youth.
The number of American students studying in China is a shadow of just a decade ago.
In the 2023-24 academic year, 800 US students were enrolled in Chinese universities, according to a 2024 American Chamber of Commerce in China report. Enrolments peaked in 2011, when around 15,000 Americans studied in China. The drastic decline was attributed mostly to three years of the zero-Covid policy and ongoing bilateral tensions. Just before the pandemic, 11,000 American students had been studying in China, according to the report.
Improving those numbers would not just benefit international relations.
Xiong, from 21st Century Education, said that maintaining a global education push was 'a strategic step in building a strong country'.
'The tensions will have a severe impact on Chinese universities to achieve joint international cooperation in scientific research and talent cultivation,' Xiong said.
And university rankings may not be the best way of measuring that success.
Xiong said that rating systems could have a negative influence on university operations, leading to more pressure for quantity over quality and more frequent cases of fraudulent research papers.
'Ranking universities by using indicators such as the number of papers published and the number of citations is a simplistic and quantitative approach, but the spiritual qualities and traditions of a university cannot be quantified,' Xiong said.
'Talent development is the key to competitiveness. We cannot have first-class scientific research without first-class talent.'
-- SOUTH CHINA MORNING POST