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Published online by Journal of Contemporary China

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Published online by Cambridge University Press

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David Zweig

ABSTRACT: A laudable component of Sino–US rapprochement after 1978 has been collaborative research. But China’s aggressive effort to benefit from its scientific diaspora, the cutting-edge technology that has
gravitated to China from the United States, and America’s new perception of China as a “strategic
competitor,” led the Trump administration to roll out the “China Initiative,” securitizing scientific collaboration. Despite a strong pushback from universities and Asian–American rights groups, this scientific cooperation remains at risk.

Scientific exchanges enhance humankind. Thus, a major component of Sino–US rapprochement after 1978 was academic and scholarly exchanges, eventually leading to collaborative research. Such efforts have been lauded. In 2014, the president of the National Institutes of Health (NIH), Francis Collins, speaking at Fudan University in Shanghai, said that “science has no borders because knowledge belongs to all humankind,” while an internal NIH review found that between 2010 and 2019, joint projects funded by NIH and the Chinese had produced several high-impact papers on cancer.

So, What Went Wrong?
Changes in Chinese policy, the high level of cutting-edge technology that has gravitated to China, and shifts in the United States’ perceptions of its national security, ended this cozy relationship. To benefit from its overseas talent, Chinese institutions, such as the ministry of education (MOE), the Chinese Academy of Sciences, and the Organization Department of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), established programs to bring back the country’s best and brightest. However, as the very best scientists in the Chinese diaspora chose to stay abroad, both the MOE and the CCP offered part-time affiliations with Chinese universities, whereby these researchers maintained their jobs overseas and continued their research in Western laboratories. They also trained tens of thousands of Mainland PhD candidates and postdoctoral fellows who worked with them in their laboratories.

But around 2013, the CCP stopped publishing the names of part-time participants in its Thousand Talents Plan (TTP), taking the program underground. In 2018, the Trump administration’s National Defense Strategy labelled China a “strategic competitor” seeking global preeminence. Replacing inter-state strategic competition with terrorism as the primary concern of US national security securitized scientific collaboration. […]

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Boston College Center for International Higher Education

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David Zweig, Kellee S. Tsai, Alwyn Didar Singh

ABSTRACT: China and India have significant overseas populations that constitute global talent, and both countries recognize that reverse migration of diasporic talent can contribute to domestic economic development. This study compares China and India’s capacity to encourage return migration with a focus on overseas entrepreneurs who return to start new firms in their homeland. In addition to reviewing state policies and prior related research, we analyze returnees’ views towards the state using two original data sets: a China survey of 100 returned and 100 local entrepreneurs from Shanghai, Beijing and Guangzhou conducted in 2004 through a face-to-face format; and an India survey administered in 2016–17, comprising 150 returned entrepreneurs and senior managers, and 75 local entrepreneurs in the Indian cities of Pune, Bangalore and New Delhi. Given that India and China began their reforms approximately 13 years apart, comparing these two surveys provides a more developmentally appropriate comparison than purely synchronic surveys. We find that that returned Chinese entrepreneurs have a more positive view of the state and are more willing to work with the local state than their Indian counterparts. Futhermore, returnee entrepreneurs in India are less tolerant of rent-seeking behaviour by local bureaucrats than those in China, and view the local state as being more of an impediment than a source of support. Overall, a significant gap remains between China and India in terms of policies, returnee perceptions, and on-the-ground experiences of returned entrepreneurs.

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Science Direct: World Development Volume 138, February 21, 105192
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Paper presented at the conference on “Bridging Minds Across the Pacific
The 25-Year Sino-U.S. Educational Exchange,” Fudan University, Shanghai, November 10-11

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Repository.ust.hk/ir/Record/1783.1-12377

Conference on ‘Foreign-Domestic Linkages in China’s International Behaviours,’
Centre for Asia-Pacific Initiatives, University of Victoria, BC, April 24-25, 2008

ABSTRACT: Since the late 19th century many Chinese leaders have studied abroad, mostly in Japan, the US or the former Soviet Union. Recently, thousands are returning from studying overseas. Is this new cohort of returnees more internationalist than Chinese who do not study abroad? If their values differ and they join China’s elite, they could influence China’s foreign policy. Drawing on surveys of returnees from Japan and Canada over the past 15 years, we compare their views on “co-operative internationalism” and “assertive nationalism” with the attitudes of China’s middle class drawn from a nationwide survey in 2006. Our returnees are both more “internationalist” than the middle class and less nationalistic. So they are likely to support China’s increasing international role and perhaps constrain China’s growing nationalist sentiment.

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Cambridge University Press on behalf of the School of Oriental and African Studies
Repository.ust.hk/ir/Record/1783.1-14458