Scientists of Chinese descent leaving the US at an accelerating pace

Even before the US government announced plans to crack down on perceived espionage by China in 2018, scientists of Chinese-descent were leaving the US. Since then the numbers leaving have only accelerated as both junior and experienced faculty depart, according to a new analysis.

The work reveals that nearly 20,000 scientists of Chinese-descent who began their careers in the US have left for other countries, including China, between 2010 and 2021, a team at Princeton, Harvard and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology has found. ‘The migration has increased during those 12 years, from 900 scientists in 2010 to 2621 in 2021, with an accelerated departure rate (75% higher) in the last three years … coinciding with the launch of the China Initiative in 2018,’ the authors wrote in the supplementary material.

Launched during the Trump administration to curb Chinese state-backed espionage and efforts aimed at stealing US intellectual property, the China Initiative was terminated in February of last year following criticism  that it was tantamount to racial profiling and damaging to the US’s scientific enterprise. The cancellation of the US Department of Justice (DOJ) programme came after many of the criminal cases the US government brought against academic researchers under the initiative were dismissed.