An observation from the ground; what follows is based on a small sample size, but I believe it can be extended. The (academic) scientific field I work in in the US has a large number of Chinese students and postdocs. 20 years ago, many of the strongest of these would stay in the US for faculty gigs. Now, most go back to China.

The analysis this essay would posit would be "anti-Chinese sentiment" in the US - which is part of the story. The other part is that the Chinese govt. supports research with a lot of $. A new STEM faculty member in the US, even at a rich, elite institution might start with, at most 5 PhD students and a couple of postdocs. In china's new, elite institutions, you can double or triple that labor amount from the get-go; strong midcareer science faculty regularly have groups sizes of 40+ people, something only available to the top 1% of science faculty here. Part of this is labor cost, but not all of it. Their labs are also supported tremendously well with new instrumentation, technician support etc. If you look at the arc of elite science papers measured by journal prestige (yes, yes, bias and all that but the correlation is there) it bends upwards sharply from elite science institutions in china.

If as a non-chinese citizen, you hold nationalist fears of being out-competed by china in academic STEM research.....those fears are valid.
posted by lalochezia at 7:26 AM on April 28 [14 favorites]

I just read the Western counterargument to this line in The Fire of the Dragon by Ian Williams:

...in China the Communist Party is never far from the lab or the lecture theatre or the boardroom, whatever the share certificate says, or a researcher’s nominal affiliation. Supposedly commercial enterprises enjoy subsidies, hidden and open, and are deployed by the Party in a strategic manner. Research bodies are similarly encumbered since by law innovations must be shared with the security apparatus and the military. Xi Jinping has tightened this requirement by having ‘civil–military fusion’ written into the constitution. Beijing is adept at picking off know-how it sees as strategically important, and no doubt regards British academia as a rich and gullible repository.

I think this picture is basically accurate, but it doesn't quite explain the recent pullback from China for two reasons. The first is that this picture has always been accurate. Not as if Western policy makers suddenly googled how China's government works and got spooked. The second is that we are happy to intertwine ourselves with illiberal and authoritarian states in other contexts.

Definitely agree with Yangyang Cheng's suggestion that the real problem is that China "caught up" and is now a sort of autonomous peer. Don't see any reason, in this article or elsewhere, to anticipate a better or more collaborative future though. We're just witnessing the birth of a multi-polar world.
posted by Hume at 3:23 PM on April 28 [2 favorites]

The essay is a counterargument to that framing, not the other way around. It's pushing back on the expansive view of "security" that has been encroaching upon every sphere and demands exceptional measures to uphold it. Just as if everything is a priority, then nothing is, if everything is security...

I'm curious why one would label it a "Western counterargument", as if the author is representing a non-Western perspective. I don't think she explicitly spells this out, but the intellectual tradition in science academia is that it's open, collaborative, and positive-sum - basic advances in medicine, chemistry, agriculture, etc have led to vastly improved lives for billions of people all around the world. So when somebody declares that it's necessary to halt scientific exchange with China, what they're really saying is that it's more important that the US to be at a relative advantage than it is for everybody to be better off in absolute terms. This was the zero-sum mentality behind the trade war under Trump, which was a massive failure in terms of its ostensible goals. I think it would be a mistake to see it repeated again in science.
posted by ndr at 2:40 PM on April 29 [2 favorites]

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