Chinese locales are looking to lure top scientific talent from overseas by offering lavish sums for resettling, as well as housing, health care, and other perks. The moves come as the Trump administration cuts funding for science and works to expel Chinese students.
“The competition for talent is intense both across China and within different districts of the same city,” Yanbo Wang, a science policy researcher at the University of Hong Kong, told Nature.
At the national, provincial, and local levels, officials are working to recruit top talent, Nature reports. The city of Taizhou is offering $14,000 to university graduates who relocate, while Gulin County is providing $42,000 to PhD graduates, and Hunan province is giving away $140,000 to doctoral students who come from abroad.
For U.S. scientists thinking of relocating, Wang said, “The Trump administration has made that decision much, much easier than ever before.”
Last month, the administration said it would begin “aggressively” revoking visas for Chinese students, including “those with connections to the Chinese Communist Party or studying in critical fields.” The administration has also slashed funding for research at federal institutions and at top universities.
Amid crackdowns on immigration, attacks on academic freedom, and deep cuts to funding, some 75 percent of U.S. researchers are considering leaving the country, a recent Nature poll found. Already, there has been an uptick in U.S. scientists applying for jobs abroad.
Some high-profile U.S. researchers have recently relocated to China, among them Yang Dan, an influential neuroscientist, formerly of UC Berkeley. Dan is originally from Beijing.
Like China, Europe is looking to poach disgruntled scientists. The E.U. recently announced that it would be putting half a billion euros toward making Europe a “magnet” for researchers.
“The American government is currently using brute force against the universities in the U.S.A., so that researchers from America are now contacting Europe,” German Chancellor Friedrich Merz said in March. “This is a huge opportunity for us.”
U.S. cuts to research on climate, the environment, and other fields could have a lasting effect, experts say.
“The thing people need to understand about the long term is that when you fire people and when you dismantle projects, you can’t recreate that the moment you have a new administration,” former Obama science advisor John Holdren told Nature. “You’ve lost the momentum. You’ve lost the knowledge, and rebuilding it can take years to decades.”
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