Through a survey, a small group of engineers and biostatisticians from Princeton, Harvard, and MIT discovered that Chinese scientists working in the United States no longer feel welcome there.
The group describes how they analyzed surveys taken by 1,304 Chinese academics working in the United States and what they found in their paper that was published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
The Chinese Initiative was established by the Trump administration in 2018 with the intention of locating Chinese spies working in the United States. One of its primary objectives was to locate spies working in academia, which, if found, would reduce the alleged transfer of technology from the United States to China.
The U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) began attempting to prosecute and arrest suspected academic spies as part of the initiative. Most such endeavors bombed because of the absence of proof. When Vice President Biden won the 2020 election, the China Initiative was canceled. However, the initiative’s lingering effects have been discovered by this new effort’s researchers.
Regardless of their activities or work, scientists working in the United States who were Chinese or even Chinese Americans came under suspicion during the initiative. This brought about a feeling of dread toward baseless indictments, which drove numerous Chinese researchers to leave the U.S. or to basically consider doing so.
It additionally prompted extraordinarily diminished correspondences between researchers in the U.S. teaming up with partners in China—aa pattern that has continued even after the cancellation of the drive. The goal of this new study was to find out how Chinese and Chinese-American scientists feel about living and working in the United States. To do this, they looked for patterns in Chinese scientific endeavors in 200 million scientific papers. They discovered that numerous Chinese scientists in the United States are continuing to return to China.
The research team then created and distributed a survey to find out more about how Chinese and Chinese-American scientists feel about living and working in the United States. They received 1,304 responses, and after reviewing them, they discovered that 72% of respondents felt unsafe, and over a third felt unwelcome in the United States. Likewise, 86% of them detailed finding it harder to enlist top-level global understudies compared with five years earlier.
More information: Yu Xie et al, Caught in the crossfire: Fears of Chinese–American scientists, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (2023). DOI: 10.1073/pnas.2216248120
