"Science is woke and experts don’t know anything! I trust my culture warrior outrage merchants I watch on YouTube! They’re the most logical people on Earth! I am a free thinker!
"It really is incredible.
Looks like Europe is trying its hardest to rope them in and they’ll probably be successful. Too many Americans have brainworms about China to give them a chance.
Chinese academia is way too competitive and exhausting for your American scientists. How many American grad students and postdocs are willing to work 6-7 days a week and have their lab meeting held on Sunday, which is becoming a common occurrence now?
These are some of the most hardworking people out there (and you can see them carrying their work ethic overseas as grad students and postdocs in Western universities) and churning out top tier scientific publications every year. These are the people you are going to compete against. If you think the “publish or perish” pressure is bad in Western academia, then in China this is ramped up to the next level.
Finally, connections are very important in China, even more so than in America and Europe. Much of the institute’s funding is going to be received by the heads of the departments, who then distribute the funds to the individual labs underneath them. Unless you are already a well-renowned scientist, you are going to be competing against your peers who have actual connections to the senior figures in the department.
Chinese science is very well funded, but the competition is also extreme, just like most industries in China. You don’t publish well, you won’t survive. Europe may be lacking in their funding, but their work culture is also more relaxed and suited to Westerners.
I have several friends with PhD who emigrated to the US and loved it there because, according to them, at least it is nowhere near as exhausting as they had it in China. They actually have the time to enjoy their weekends, a luxury you won’t get in Chinese academia.
How many American grad students and postdocs are willing to work 6-7 days a week and have their lab meeting held on Sunday, which is becoming a common occurrence now?
Pretty much everyone I met in plant biology and biotech has had a schedule like this.
But I’m Guatemalan 😳
This all sounds terrible?
Depends on your perspective. It’s great for productivity and overtaking the West, but the entire neijuan (involution, or extreme competition) is already happening at a pace that cannot be easily stopped, even with the government initiative promising to do so.
Think about this: the major tax base of both central and local governments are value-added tax, followed by corporate income tax. Besides, nearly 1/3 of local government revenue comes from land premium. As the property market is imploding, the reliance on the industrial/manufacturing sector becomes even more critical for the local governments, and that means the industries have to work harder to churn out more value-added goods and services to add to the local government tax revenues, without which it could not finance its operating expenditures (the city has to run the subways, rails, various infrastructure and public utilities, and paying the civil servants etc.)
While there may be an intention to stop the extreme competition from happening, there is no incentive for the government to actually do so. You don’t want to be the first one to lose out among your peers, and so it becomes a race to the bottom. The entire system needs to be revamped.
So is there very little (or no?) income tax?
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US scientists escaping fascism to Europe just to be hit with the exact same shit in five years is gonna be a funny bit
It is a safe assumption that a majority of current US scientists who leave will most likely go to Europe, yes. But long term that’s a relatively small piece of the brain drain issue compared to which countries will end up producing more (and better-educated) scientists in the coming years. It’s not just a matter of the ones that already exist going elsewhere, it’s that there is so much less incentive and ability for a person to become a scientist in the US than there used to be while there is significant incentive and ability to become a scientist in China. I expect the incentive in the EU is also going to rapidly deteriorate, so the influx of US scientists there is just a postponement of brain drain in the west as a whole.
I don’t actually know the numbers, but I assume (and probably many Americans would also assume) that there are more English speakers in Europe than China, due to our closer cultural relationship with them, and because whiteness.
Americans don’t want to have to learn a new language, especially one that seems as difficult as Mandarin. So that alone will be a huge incentive for them to prefer Europe (especially western europe).
English is the lingua franca in academia, I’d would expect at least for most of higher ed to know enough English to write scientific papers?
Most science production in the US is geared toward instruments of death, computerized financialization and funneling money to administrators
By scattering American brain power across the world, true scientific research can blossom in the most unexpected places, to say nothing of the advantage China will hold in the future
99% of the time accelerationist developments are a net negative, but this is definitely a 1% exception, a brainless empire is a dead empire
Fingers crossed this leads to the US losing its edge in military tech and thus its ability to bully the rest of the world.
Science just falls from the coconut tree
Oh great, Americans are going to move here
I want to echo people’s hopes that this will weaken the USA-Westoid Empire militarily, but I suspect most likely they’ll move to Europe and end up working in European arms companies as part of their push to re-militarize, and the US will just buy Euro-weapons.
Euro arms industry is apparently even more of a deindustrialized neoliberal grift than the US arms industry.
Critical support for Trump’s struggle against USAmerican scientific and cultural hegemony!
Long live the Great Stumble Backward!
Good.
