A new study shows most elite researchers in China remained in the country over the course of their careers.Credit: An Yuan/China News Service/VCG/Getty
Deng Xiaoping’s 1979 visit to the United States heralded a new era of economic and scientific exchange between China and the United States. Xiaoping, then the leader of the Chinese Communist Party, famously donned an iconic cowboy hat at a rodeo in Simonton, Texas. Simon Marginson, a social scientist at the University of Bristol, UK, describes the trip as “rapport-building”, cementing the return of full diplomatic relations after a long period of hostility.
When Cong Cao, a social scientist at the University of Nottingham in Ningbo, China, decided to investigate the bibliographic impact of the new US–China relationship, he expected that foreign-educated academics would have increasingly important roles as elite members of China’s scientific academies. He covered the subject in his PhD thesis1 and in a 2004 book called China’s Scientific Elite.
A study, published in Nature Human Behaviour and co-authored by Cao, found that China’s opening in the late 1970s and 1980s did indeed bring US and Chinese researchers together, and that Chinese scientists who worked in both countries were more likely to become mid-level or senior researchers at both elite and non-elite universities in China2, but that this cross-fertilization is not reflected in China’s elite science academies.
The authors found that a greater percentage of elected members of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) and the Chinese Academy of Engineering (CAE) had obtained their PhDs from the 1980s onwards in China rather than the United States, says Cao. Domestically educated scholars now predominate in the leadership of Chinese universities, the authors write, adding that this trend arises “from the practice of appointing academicians to these positions and the prevalence of these scholars within the elite echelons”.
In the past year, increased hostility between China and the administration of US President Donald Trump seems unlikely to increase opportunities for scholars who have bounced between both countries to reach senior positions in either, sources say.
Booming science
The authors point to China’s “worrisome” trend in undervaluing foreign education, a move “considered less conducive to institutional reforms and the attraction of talent from abroad”. But they concede that this decline is because of China’s growing strength in higher education and research capabilities.
Indeed, China’s global ascent in science is reflected in a Nature Index ranking of countries by their research output, in which it now holds the top slot. The CAS is the world’s leading institution in another Nature Index ranking of institutional output of scientific research in premier journals.
The shift to domestically obtained PhD-holders, says Cao, reflects a move towards scientific isolationism. The study’s other authors were historian Jianan Huang and social scientist Hong Liu, both at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore.
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