This week I read an article about how Chinese scientists trained in America are starting to go home. Ok this is not a huge surprise because of all the nationalities that do their graduate or post graduate training here, the Chinese have always been the most likely to go back. It has to do with their culture, strong family ties, and weird sense of nationalism. (I say weird because most dislike the government but love the country.) However this article was about that established Chinese scientists are going home, lured by massive amounts of funding, to shiny new institutes and universities. Ok that is still fine they go home, but the cost of getting them back is much higher. What is concerning is that China, Singapore, etc are all trying to lure non-native scientists to these same blank check funded, shiny new institutes and universities. Previously many scientists of European decent were hesitant to go live in Singapore (a country where spitting on the sidewalk is punishable by caning) but as NSF and NIH budgets got cut, and funding got harder to find that is starting to change. The brain drain is starting to reverse; innovative, well trained scientists are leaving the US, but these countries still largely send their youth to the US to get training.
I love my country, the USA is the greatest country on earth but we are no where near as good at planning ahead as the Chinese. (Think about it, they’ve been a civilization for thousands of years, so they have practical experience with plans that take generations to complete. (Look at the Asian hobby of bonsai, these trees take a lifetime to reach a pleasing form, and may continue to develop for hundreds of years. That takes patience.) The USA is almost 230, that means at most 8 generations have been born American’s, and it was less than a 100 years ago that we obtained world power status. All of America’s grand plans are on time scales of months; projects that take a decade or more to show that they are justifiable are nearly unheard of. Why do we want everything fast? Because we were young and growth could occur quickly, so there was no reason to be patient, we were a nation of limitless possibility. America has always relied on immigration to keep the country young, so as long as that keeps up nothing will change.
Ok so why am I worried? China’s education system is lacking, it doesn’t teach creativity, so while it produces vast numbers of well educated people, it doesn’t produce innovators. That is why China has enjoyed a great deal success in manufacturing goods designed else where, but it hasn’t been able to bring the whole process full in house. (With all the monetary gains that brings.) The Chinese are wonderful at evolutionary improvements (the cheaper, and faster), but are lacking in revolutionary improvements (the new and different.) The scary part is that China knows this, and is trying to fix the deficiency. How? First they sent their best and brightest to other countries to complete their educations. For many they learned about the revolutionary work being done else, so they could bring the information back home and put it to use. Those were the easy ones to get back home, since the Western scientific machine saw them as a source of cheap, hard working labor, and offered them little chance for advancement after their training was complete. Now the real gold was those who could adapt and think creatively. They flourished in the West and became part of the machine that created them, and began to train others. So to get them back China had to basically buy them back, and if they committed the resources to buy back their own people why not get anyone who will come? Having these resources with in its borders means that China can now begin to innovate on its own, and train some of the next generation of scientists without sending them abroad. Sure China will still send some of the brightest abroad for training since there is still much to be learned from the West, but the most likely to be stars will be trained at home. (This reduces the chances of losing good people.) (It is worth noting that the Chinese aren’t doing this just in the sciences, but in business too.)
(A brief side note, many scientists regardless of ethnic origin are not innovators, the number of people who are willing to risk it all to change the world is very small, our education system is just better suited to fostering that sprit. Also, there is a great deal of need evolutionary improvement, so far more people are and should be involved at that phase, then in creation. However, I’ve covered this all before, I just wanted to be clear I wasn’t being down on 1/6 of the world’s population.)
Unlike Japan after the Black Ships arrived, China is controlling its Westernization, since Westernization caused a civil war in Japan. (It almost caused two civil wars, but the changes in the 50’s and 60, never really resulted in open violence.) China is remaking itself into a self contained superpower, much like America was in the 50s.
Now what can America do to ensure that it doesn’t suffer as China grows? Well America needs to replicate China’s drive to foster innovation. We need to produce home grown scientists and engineers, by teaching the sciences with the same vigor we have for the sports programs. We need to, as a nation, realize that the money spent on the NIH, DOE, DARPA, NSF, etc is not wasted, it is invested, and that the interest is seen in improves in our way our of life, be that monetary or medical. We can’t rely on private funding for science because private funding often is given with a nondisclosure clause attached. A good start would be increasing the NIH and NSF budgets at a rate to track inflation, great start would be a 10% increase a year for a couple years, and perhaps a couple major grants to create shiny new institutes to lure talent back to the US (or at least fund new buildings to replace the ones built during the growth years of the 50s, that are falling down.) We can’t stop training people from other countries, and we can’t stop them from going home but we can stop them from wanting to go home. We need to get rid of our sense of entitlement and get back to the can do sprit that made this nation great. If we don’t some day soon you might be reading this on a computer that wasn’t just built in China, but designed there too. Ha nai dai!
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