China Luring Scientists Back Home

Shi Yigong, who left Princeton University to become Dean of Life Sciences at Tsinghua University

Saw this interesting article in the NY Times: Fighting Trend, China is Luring Scientists Home.  Many Chinese scientists, rather than staying in the U.S. to do their research, are heading back home to China.  The dude in the picture above gave up a 10 million dollar grant and a Princeton laboratory with a 2 million a year budget.  Why are these guys leaving?

They are lured by their patriotism, their desire to serve as catalysts for change and their belief that the Chinese government will back them.

“I felt I owed China something,” said Dr. Shi, 42, who is described by Tsinghua students as caring and intensely driven. “In the United States, everything is more or less set up. Whatever I do here, the impact is probably tenfold, or a hundredfold.”

He and others like him left the United States with fewer regrets than some Americans might assume. While he was courted by a clutch of top American universities and rose swiftly through Princeton’s academic ranks, Dr. Shi said he believed many Asians confronted a glass ceiling in the United States.

I remember someone important saying that it was folly to educate other countries’ people and to then send them back to work in their own countries, and this person proposed having a mandatory American post-graduation residency requirement for foreign students in the the U.S.  In the cases of Dr. Shi and Dr. Rao, it would’ve been redundant to have these requirements since they stayed here for such a long time voluntarily, but even after all these years, it’s still a loss for us.

As with the Lou Jing report, the media left out a big part of the story.  What the article doesn’t say is that Tsinghua University and Peking University are among the very top schools in country of 1.3 billion; they are literally #1 and #2 in a country that values education MUCH more than ours.  They are like the Harvard and Princeton of China times ten.  Rao and Shi are like rock stars in a country of 1.3 billion people.  Career-wise, there really is no comparison–it’s a huge step up for both men to become deans at the #1 and #2 universities in their land of origin.  America simply doesn’t offer this kind of opportunity.

Still, you have to wonder.  If their kids were growing up in this country, if there were no glass ceiling for Asians, and if they were happy with the culture here, would they have stayed?  In a time when America is trying to boost its world standing in the sciences and trying come up with technological solutions to problems like energy and global warming, we could use more talented people at the top of the science hierarchy.

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