Prominent computer scientist Chen Jing leaves US to teach in China
Specialist in computational economics brings ‘dual perspective’ after returning to Beijing’s Tsinghua University as a professor.
The US has been discriminating against Chinese researchers for government funding and accusing them of spying on behalf of the Chinese government. It's no surprise at all when top researchers go over to China as a result.
That's probably a significant factor but from my time in academia I talked to a lot of Chinese people who said it was a major point of pride for China to be able to draw top researchers home from the West.
Something like 30 or 40 years ago China's research reputation was really poor and their best candidates were all training in the West and then not coming back if they found any success. They've been improving that situation for decades and now they're obviously a top-tier research country.
A lot of their best candidates now train in China but it's still seen as very prestigious any time they can attract a successful Chinese researcher back from a career in the US. She may or may not have been facing some kind of BS here but most of the time these people are recruited hard and well incentivized. If they want you then they're probably offering a pretty sweet deal.
Back when I was working at a large university in Denmark, our administration kept harping on and on about how we as an institution needed to be mindful of the Chinese attempts to steal our researchers. I was already pretty pro-China at that point, so I would just mock the messages to my colleagues by talking about the sneaky attempts to steal our researchers by offering them better pay, living standards, funding for their research and less political intervention in their work. Most of my colleagues didn't understand why China was even considered a problem, but before the initiative even got off the ground, the war in Ukraine happened, and suddenly we all had to go to mandatory meetings about the evil russians and the heroic ukrainians (whom we were now arming to the teeth).
