Survey finds a third of Chinese scientists in the US feel unwelcome in the country

Feelings of “fear and anxiety” have led many academic scientists of Chinese heritage to consider leaving the US since the launch in 2018 of the “China Initiative“. That is according to a new study from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and Princeton and Harvard universities, which also finds that the atmosphere has stopped Chinese scientists from applying for US government grants. The study’s authors warn that if the situation is not resolved, the US will lose “scientific talent to China and other countries”.

The China Initiative was set up by the Trump administration in November 2018 to root out and prosecute perceived Chinese spies in American research and industry. According to then Attorney General William Barr, the initiative sought to counter “the systemic efforts by the [People’s Republic of China] to enhance its economic and military strength at America’s expense”.

However, the initiative was criticized for unfairly targeting academics. The US Department of Justice (DOJ) brought more than 20 court cases against scientists of Chinese descent, charging that their connections with colleagues in China facilitated the transfer of sensitive US technology and intellectual property to the Chinese government. Most of those cases, however, ended in not guilty verdicts or hung juries.

Losing talent to other countries is actually causing national security issues

Kai Li

The US eventually shut down the intiative in early 2022, owing to what the justice department said were “perceptions that it unfairly painted Chinese Americans and United States residents of Chinese origin as disloyal”. Gisela Kusakawa, executive director of the Asian American Scholar Forum, told Physics World that the initiative “was criminalizing academic activity”.

‘Chilling effect’

The new study, which is based on a survey of over 1300 academic scientists of Chinese heritage in the US, found that over a third of respondents feel unwelcome in the US and 72% do not feel safe as an academic researcher. It also reveals that almost two thirds are worried about collaborations with China and 86% perceive it is harder to recruit top international students now compared to five years ago.

“The data are sobering,” says MIT engineer Gang Chen, who was not involved in the study but was arrested under the China Initiative in January 2021 only to have government drop all charges a year later.

The study also highlights that the US is losing top graduate students from China, who are instead choosing to stay in China or move to elsewhere in Asia or Europe. “The China Initiative and its chilling effects were caused by some policy-makers talking about national security,” says Kai Li, a computer scientist from Princeton University, who was not involved in the study. “But losing talent to other countries [as a result] is actually causing national security issues.”

Junming Huang from Princeton’s Center on Contemporary China who co-authored the study, says that returning to normality will not be easy. “It took one year after the China Initiative started to observe changes in the attitudes of Chinese scientists,” he told Physics World. “It will take longer to observe the change now that it’s ended.”

Indeed, Li thinks the pending cases of the initiative are continuing to have “a chilling effect”. As a result, people are choosing to go back to China while those who remain in the US, particularly in engineering and computer science, are not applying for federal grants for their research over fears of reprisals.