It's already been happening for years. Award winning faculty and scientists are fleeing US universities and institutions and setting up shop in China, often with more funding and talent available, and no McCarthyism accusations of being spies. It started officially in 2018 with the US Department of Justice's "China Initiative", which basically just allowed anyone to go on a witch hunt of Chinese and Chinese American academics. Of course, the vast majority of those cases were bogus and was just a guise for racism.
This isn't the first time. In the 1950s, the founder of Berkeley JPL, an MIT professor who was one of the forefathers of NASA and Manhattan Project contributor, and who Theodore von Karman called a generational genius, Chinese educated Qian Xuesen was humiliated with accusations of being a communist spy and given a multi-year house arrest where he couldn't work so that his knowledge would fall behind the state of the art. He was then deported, and went back to China where he created the Chinese space program entirely from scratch. In China today, he's widely known as a national hero and the "father of Chinese rocketry". If you really want your mind blown, look up his family tree and see how many Nobels and National Science Medals are related to him.
The past few years alone has seen some really high profile scientists taking their knowledge and experience with them to China. These are people who've spent 30+ years building lives here in the US, and were initially being forced out, but now are actually being lured with better pay packages and working conditions since the first wave was treated so well. It's absolutely insane.
> Award winning faculty and scientists are fleeing US universities and institutions and setting up shop in China, often with more funding and talent available, and no McCarthyism accusations of being spies. It started officially in 2018 with the US Department of Justice's "China Initiative", which basically just allowed anyone to go on a witch hunt of Chinese and Chinese American academics.
While some of what you write is accurate, there’s also plenty of hyperbole and omission in what you said.
According to research by Stanford: ”19,955 scientists of Chinese descent who began their careers in the U.S. but left for other countries, including China, between 2010 and 2021.”
And: ”Among the scientists of Chinese descent who left the U.S. in 2010, 48% moved to mainland China and Hong Kong, and 52% moved to other countries.”
So we lost twenty thousand scientists of Chinese descent over roughly a decade, half of which went back to China? That seems horrible. Where’s the hyperbole?
That's going to be a little skewed because the initial years was primarily scientists fleeing to Europe, Australia, Canada. The last few years has been heavily China.
The term for them is useful idiots not assets. The democrats did enormous damage to the Ukrainian cause pushing the russia hoax in 2017/18. Steele assumed there was competent intelligence analysts to analyse what he collected but instead it was politicians.
I think the complaint is with the government hearings to investigate individual citizens political views. Doesn’t seem especially aligned with the supposed values of the country.
Many of the people outed and persecuted for homosexuality were really gay. That doesn’t make it any less offensive.
It's just not even good security policy, and in some cases will do irreparable harm. These are incredibly smart and valuable people who are leaving and no longer under your sphere of influence, and where their work will now massively benefit your perceived adversary, eg China wouldn't have a nuclear program today if it weren't for the 50s episode.
It's cutting off your nose, face, and brain just to get a little bit of fun discrimination in.
Even if they were communists or had communist sympathies, who cares? I am pretty sure Oppenheimer did way more for the country than McCarthy. We should persecute/prosecute for illegal things they do, not for their political leanings.
McCarthy accused 12,000 people of being Communists.
Of those 12,000, fewer than 1000 were actually members of the Communist Party. Many of the accused (an estimated 5000) were just gay (at a time when that was still illegal).
Of those 12,000, fewer than a dozen were actually spies for the Soviets.
McCarthy leaked more classified information in his hunt for Communists than the spies actually did.
I never liked him. It's just a fact that America was full of communists before the liberal-tankie split when it no longer was socially acceptable to be a communist since they started pasting protesters with tanks.
This isn't the first time. In the 1950s, the founder of Berkeley JPL, an MIT professor who was one of the forefathers of NASA and Manhattan Project contributor, and who Theodore von Karman called a generational genius, Chinese educated Qian Xuesen was humiliated with accusations of being a communist spy and given a multi-year house arrest where he couldn't work so that his knowledge would fall behind the state of the art. He was then deported, and went back to China where he created the Chinese space program entirely from scratch. In China today, he's widely known as a national hero and the "father of Chinese rocketry". If you really want your mind blown, look up his family tree and see how many Nobels and National Science Medals are related to him.
The past few years alone has seen some really high profile scientists taking their knowledge and experience with them to China. These are people who've spent 30+ years building lives here in the US, and were initially being forced out, but now are actually being lured with better pay packages and working conditions since the first wave was treated so well. It's absolutely insane.
https://www.justsecurity.org/82948/anti-asian-prejudice