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The bigger impact isn't luring U.S. scientists to China. It's keeping top Chinese scientists/students in China. Chinese grad students/postdocs are highly represented at elite U.S. universities. With recent political changes in the U.S. making more difficult for international students to come to the U.S. or at least giving the impression that the U.S. is not as friendly to immigration, enrollment from international students have started to drop in the past 2 years.
https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2018/11/13/new-internati... https://cgsnet.org/first-time-over-decade-international-grad...
I am employed by one of the big tech companies in the bay and was recently chosen to interview candidates for our new grad program. I was astonished by how many top of class graduate students we brought into the program that had identical backgrounds. Around 90% had studied in and were from China, usually undergrad there and Ivy League grad school with close to perfect GPAs. If they are keeping their students, I haven’t seen it yet. Will see how it plays out in the near future
This is fantastic news. Science will eventually benefit all of mankind even if the benefits are initially felt closer to where they're conducted.
I welcome increased science funding regardless of who is doing it, particularly when we're talking about non-military scientific research.
If this makes the US feel competitive and they increase funding state-side then so much the better. We'd all benefit from that too.
I agree. It's also good to have more diversification of science and technology progress. That way if one country gets an anti-science leader, it makes less of a difference to overall human progress.
I agree. An international competition over “who can do the best research” is certainly something to welcome.
Completely agree, hopefully we will see more funding in areas that have been "forgotten" due to recent hype cycles.
I don't really think China is luring too many U.S. scientists... Most of the scientists I know pretty much ignore research out of China, because a large portion of it is just not replicable (and / or lies).
China has been progressing quite quickly considering how young their academic/research institutions are.
A very common path for Chinese scientists is to go to a western university for their doctorate and post-doc, develop a research program, and return to a faculty position in China.
Many Chinese grants include salary for the PI, so an investigator getting multiple grants can earn a lot of money. It's an attractive incentive that appears to be working quite well (from my limited exposure).
As for reliability, there are certainly some issues, but I hesitate to paint with a broad brush. Science is often very discipline-specific in terms of reproducibility, openness of collaboration, funding, etc. etc. There absolutely are fields where the Chinese are quite strong.
Chinese AI/CS papers are definitely not going to be ignored. They are really strong on that front, for they have a huge domestic industry to sustain such level of researches and there is economical benefit to going after.
Ignoring disreputable journals from China is one thing, but I doubt any serious scientist would claim there are not incredible advances coming from that country. In field after field they've shown they can produce amazing scientific work. There is plenty of low-quality work but let's not forget the amazing work too.
Please look at the number of papers from China in top CS conferences.
In general, the reviews are double blind, making it as objective as possible at this moment.
Well I guess the first step would be luring Chinese scientists currently in US back to China (many of those have US citizenship and would also be counted as US scientists)
When I did research and at grad school a large percentage of my peers were either Asian American or Asian, with a large percentage being immigrants from China. As a researcher in the US you spend too much time writing grants and now equity initiatives introduce extra risk in the tenure system for anyone of the wrong identity. I would not underestimate the lure of easy access to grants and a less politicized tenure track system for anyone of Asian or Asian American heritage.
> Most of the scientists I know pretty much ignore research out of China ...
Ranking by the 1% most highly cited papers in math and computing for those published between 2013-2016:
6 of the top 15 universities are in mainland China,
6 USA,
2 Singapore, and
1 Hong Kong.
Tsinghua is at number 1. Singapore also seems to employ a number of researchers from China.
The article does state that MIT still leads in the broader STEM fields, but Tsinghua may soon take over.
“The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (mit) still leads in the top 1% of stem papers, but Mr Marginson says Tsinghua is on track to be “number one in five years or less”.”
https://www.economist.com/china/2018/11/17/tsinghua-universi...
In condensed matter physics, there is a lot of good and original work coming out of top Chinese universities and being published in top journals. Also, for those in the 1000 talents programs, the startup grants that they receive are draw dropping.
You need to read/speak their language to get the good research materials.
A problem not unique to China unfortunately...
This used to be the case but it is changing rapidly. Especially in Math and CS right now.
Well, you know, it’s not like the USA isn’t luring a lot of Chinese researchers and students already.
Speaking as an American who worked as a researcher in China for almost 9 years, China is way late to the “leveraging global talent” game. They should catch up, it’s only natural.
Seems like it's much easier to leverage global talent when you are leading the research at a global level. This has arguably not been this case for (modern) china until recently.
As a former researcher I am not surprised to see another nation capitalizing on the counter-productive politicization of US science.
I used to be a researcher and writing proposals suddenly started taking up much more time around 2010 to 2013 because each grant became much smaller. Each grant also became more specific in what science you were expected to produce, which essentially made us all contractors for NSF plus DOE and winning a grant was sometimes more about politics than producing excellent scholarship. This pushed a lot of great scientists out of the field.
After I left research radical leftists started a more expansive politicized attack on science that is further politisizing who gets tenure or grants essential to making scientific progress.
- Biology as a subject is the most affected right now [1], because biology shows that there are biological differences that contribute to individuals choices in a way that invalidates the univariant equity doctrine political explanations. Women on average does are as capable as men in the sciences, but they differences in choices increase the more equal the societies are.
- Science as a competence hierarchy is under attack by the equity initiatives [2], making it so that the most important factors for getting grants and tenure is often not competence.
The fact is unfortunately that these programs have been shown to not increase the production of great science [3]. Moreover, these efforts further demoralize and alienate scientists.
We should at this point not be under any doubt that unless we defeat the politicization of science the US will not remain competitive. We should ask ourselves if we want to be equal on a sinking ship or make life better by allowing everyone to compete as individuals regardless of which identity you think they belong to.
[1] https://quillette.com/2018/10/18/trans-activists-campaign-ag... [2] https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2018/04/when-wil... [3] https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2018/04/when-wil...
>We should ask ourselves if we want to be equal on a sinking ship or make life better by allowing everyone to compete as individuals regardless of which identity you think they belong to.
I think, there's a very solid cause behind it. Most of "competing individually" is essentially making different decisions and benefiting/losing from the consequences. Except over the past few decades our society has automated/protocolized those decisions away. We follow rules and documented best practices (or just let a database search figure out the right thing for us) much more than we have to improvise. So the society is looking for alternative planes for people to compete and ironically, due to our sense of compassion, the competition shifted to demonstrating that you suffer more than your peers. I'm afraid, this is also responsible for declining willingness of westerners to make families/raise kids.
I don't think biology explains away the gender gap.
On [1], I found that tptacek's commentary [4] was much helpful to shape my own opinion about it. At the very least I believe the Quillette article is inadequate as an example of, say, biology under the leftist attack.
I've been looking into topic modeling lately. It looks like this is the best library for doing that: https://github.com/baidu/Familia
Time to learn Mandarin I guess.
It looks like there are English docs too: https://github.com/baidu/Familia/blob/master/README.EN.md
Fascinating. Also in such a situation. What makes Familia the best vs. gensim/NLTK?
The research quality and funding is just one factor. The more important factor is quality of life. Things like air quality and being able to get along without knowing Chinese.
Air quality improves every year, and cities try to plant as much as trees as possible. What I like - they even plant ivy or similar things to climb highway pylons. It looks very beautiful during the summer.
Great news. It is very important that we have as much competition as possible in science. And China, being a rising power, can force western countries to invest more in technology.
China's policy towards political/ideological freedoms and "luring US academics" seems distinctly at odds. Many in academia are ideologically motivated.
but yet, many are ideological marxists with massively capitalist lifestyles.. so perhaps these things aren't so at odds.. :b
It's good to see a positive article about China. Everything i was seeing in the news seemed so negative and hostile.
Is there a good English translation service for Chinese research?
How limiting do scientists in China find the Great Firewall?
Two easy ways to encourage foreign talent. Put huge investments into English training within the country. Or as they could. Put huge investments into a far simpler language such as Esperanto to create an easier to learn (world) language. Secondly, drop the firewall so that foreign talent and local talent don’t feel so divided.
This may not be accurate, but I feel like the US benefited a lot from many foreigners knowing English. This does not seem to be the case for Chinese, though I imagine that will change.
TLDR;
China has started the The Thousand Talent program to recruit professors from all over the world: http://www.1000plan.org/en/. Also, Chinese govt now offering international students scholarships to cover the cost if they enroll: https://www.scholarshipsads.com/china-scholarships/.
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I wonder when will Russia do the same.
Meanwhile Trump is doing everything to convince talents around the globe that US will not let them pass by easily /s
LOL free smog... come one; come all!
Frankly, it's embarrassing how an absolutist regime can create a sense of more on-the-ground intellectual freedom than can a supposedly free country. Socially enforced censorship of painfully obvious facts in the west has gotten out of control, and unless we place limits on our newfound authoritarian impulses, we're going to be out-competed. While it's true that we've been very successful for a long time, success breeds complacency. Objections to things like genetic editing of humans on vague ethical grounds will just leave the advantage with others.