Amid several high-profile departures of prominent US-based chemists for China, including chemistry Nobel laureate Omar Yaghi, economic analysis indicates that higher-quality scientists are increasingly the ones returning there from the US, especially in chemistry.
The number of returnees to China rose from 31 scientists in 2004 – more than 40% of which came from the US – to over 1400 in 2022 – over half of which came from the US. The data shows that between 2004 and 2022 about 10,000 scientists of Chinese origin had gone back to China, including over 5500 from the US.
When it comes to US-based Chinese scientists, the top performers – based on the share of citations their papers receive – have become progressively more likely to go back to China. And this shift over that 18-year period appears to have been driven by chemistry .
While the likelihood of a more highly cited chemist returning to China over a less highly cited one grew nearly five percentage points between 2003 and 2022, it actually declined among physicists and life scientists.
The performance of these ‘sea turtles’ – a pun on the Mandarin slang for a student who studies abroad and then returns – once they come back to China follows a similar pattern. The returning chemists went on to outperform similarly qualified peers who remained in the US. By comparison, returning life scientists fell behind their peers in the US, and returning physicists showed mixed results.
Study co-author Bernard Yeung, who is with the National University of Singapore, notes that that he and fellow co-author Heiwei Tang from the University of Hong Kong are both ‘returnees’. Yeung, a Hong Kong-born economist and naturalised US citizen, relocated from New York University to Singapore in 2008, and Tang moved from Johns Hopkins University (JHU) to Hong Kong in 2020.
‘We are basically trying to use the data to tell a story about our experience,’ Yeung tells Chemistry World. ‘We observed China’s surge – its delivery in frontier science,’ he notes, adding that the team focused only on publications in the top tier scientific journals because they are credible.
‘They find their home territory appealing’
‘The reason that China is uniquely good at chemistry is because the government invests a lot in this area, and chemistry also fits China’s comparative advantage – it is an experimental science that requires simple, relatively non-expensive labs, compared to things like supercolliders, for example,’ he explains. ‘There are many, many Chinese who went overseas, and now they find their home territory appealing because of the government’s investment in education overall, but particularly in science.’
Stanford University’s Center on China’s Economy and Institutions states that returnees have fuelled China’s ascent in science, if unevenly. ‘The increase in scientists returning to China from overseas, mostly from the US, has coincided with China’s growing presence in elite science,’ the centre stated. ‘The findings suggest that the value of recruiting scientists home lies only partly in the returnees’ own productivity; a substantial share comes from how their presence reshapes the labs, collaborations, and research cultures around them.’
Jeremy Berg, a biochemist who was director of the US National Institutes of Health’s (NIH’s) National Institute of General Medical Sciences, says he’s had a chance to observe some aspects of this ‘brain drain’ directly. One example he points to is structural biologist Yigong Shi, who was in his lab at JHU, whom Berg describes as ‘the most talented and ambitious scientist of his age’ that he had ever encountered.
After JHU, Shi went on to other prestigious appointments in the US but was recruited back to his alma mater Tsinghua University in Beijing as a dean around 2008. Ten years later, he co-founded Westlake University, the first private research university in China.
‘As Chinese universities become stronger and recruit top-flight faculty, the momentum will only grow,’ Berg predicts. He emphasises that the life sciences in the US have been generously funded by the NIH, and so researchers in that area would be less inclined to move to China where life sciences research is not as advanced. ‘This will be less true for chemistry since chemistry funding in the US has been more constrained and China has a strong history in chemistry,’ Berg adds.
The most important message from this new data is that science should have no borders because stifling the movement of scientists cause problems, Yeung says. ‘You need bees to cross pollinate, and if you have a barrier then you hurt the flowers in both locations,’ he warns.
No comments yet