Comment by alephnerd | Hacker News Reader

Comment by alephnerd | Hacker News Reader

The drop in 2020 seems to corralate with the Visa Renewal backlog that began during the pandemic. I know a lot of very technically adept Chinese+Indian researchers who ended up taking positions back in top Chinese and Indian Universities+Companies+Govt Labs due to this.

Edit:

Digging deeper, it looks like Nature treats the Chinese Academy of Sciences (the Chinese version of US DoE National Labs) as a single institution.

I'd be curious how the US stacks up if National Lab affiliation was included in the same manner. Lots of R&D done by National Lab researchers are affiliated only with their Lab, not a university.

Also a lot of naturalized American academics can also get Chinese Academy of Sciences affiliation due to the murkiness of Chinese nationality renunciation, so that might muddy it further (eg. If I'm an academic at Harvard University with an affiliation to the CAS, which relationship does the Nature Index treat as the primary?)

Edit 2: from the Nature Index itself

"For authors who are affiliated with more than one institution, the author’s Share is split equally between each institution. The total Share for an institution is calculated by summing the Share for individual affiliated authors."

So, if a researcher at Harvard or MIT or Cal is also cross affiliated with the CAS or Tsinghua, their research output would be split equally, even if the relationship is an adjunct one with one or the other.

This sounds like the same kind of statistical gaming NUS and NTU in Singapore and KAUST in Saudi Arabia are famous for to climb up global university rankings.

Academy of science is not doe labs

Chinese gov have affiliated labs like doe national labs

Academy of science has its own graduate school and professor ranks

USTC and UCAS are treated as separate entities in the Nature Index

UCAS ranks just behind Qinghua and PKU, but has 54k post graduates compared to around 18-28K in each of the former. So it is really a lot farther behind those two top institutions than it appears on paper, not as impressive when you realize how much staff they have.

UCAS and USTC are holdovers from the Communist era, when a nation's Academy of Sciences would also include graduate education (eg. In the former Soviet Union).

In the present day, the CAS includes national labs (to use a CN to US comparison), USTC, and UCAS. Being affiliated to CAS doesn't necessarily mean affiliation to UCAS or USTC, hence why you will see researchers from Tsinghua or SJTU affiliated with CAS.

Seems "Academy of Sciences" is a legacy of communist country. IIRC lots of Warsaw pact scientists did their grad program at their respective Academy of Science.

While Visa renewal and the others mentioned may have been an immediate cause, I wouldn't be surprised by a general downward trend in observed American dominance (all other things remaining the same). The incentives to leave China and come to the US must be shrinking.

> The incentives to leave China and come to the US must be shrinking.

Seems like the opposite from my perspective. Window on a more open China seems to be shrinking fast. What makes you think reasons to leave are shrinking?

China initiatives

Different employment segments.

A lot of the labor issues in China are impacting those with lackluster qualifications.

There are still plenty of opportunities for those with world class qualifications and experience.

You are not well informed. China is opening up and attracting talent from the whole world. The "closing" is just happening to the US because of its policies.

China has been trying for over 10 years to attract talent. Right now everyone is skeptical because of the tech crackdown. Arrests. Lockdowns. Etc. There are more people leaving China than going there.

The so-called tech crackdown only affected some large corporations operating in areas that the government didn't want. A huge amount of money has been invested in several technologies and in research.

The so-called tech crackdown which has made businesses scared and caused some to move offshore to avoid CCP interference.

There’s prob more people leaving China or trying to now than ever before.

Not true, lots of talented people are going to China, specially the young. They're doing a good job of attracting people from the global south. This happens while the USA is making immigration more difficult.

Then why is there an exodus of people immigrating to Canada uk Australia. Increase in purchases of homes in other parts of Asia. Increase in visa applications for America well over pre pandemic levels?

Whose leaving? Folks with black money trying to park abroad because they know CCP can crack down vs safety of parking wealth in western housing where dysfunctional politics and entrenched interests won't go after real estate. Meanwhile actual top tier talent being retained and even returning because more opportunities in PRC than ever. They're the ones pushing PRC up these indexes. Even PRC students who go abroad aren't cream of crop anymore, many just have wealthy enough parents who know their kids won't make it in PRC, aka the bench team. Who still do good enough work to fill up space in US / western institutions.

So the families who are coming up through South America. Who don’t have money. They are the black money folks? The families buying cheap condos in Thailand for 300k to send their parents to live because of freedoms and better quality of life? How’s 300k black money? This is ignoring the high unemployment rate at the moment. I guess with so many people losing their jobs that means there’s lots of opportunities. The foreclosures on homes is an indication there are more jobs right?

If you take any small pocket of the Chinese market, you'll find millions of people. So, even if what you're saying is 100% correct, this doesn't paint a complete picture of the Chinese economy. In aggregate, China is growing faster than other economies and in engineering and scientific terms it is growing much faster.

The CCP often says a lot of things. They spent years telling their citizens that their way is the right way and that India is a failure yet India is growing steadily while Chinas population is crippling, manufacturing is leaving, unemployment is on the raise, people are losing their homes and money.

I don’t understand the mental gymnastics people go through trying to justify and defend China when the people are suffering.

It’s like believing the covid deaths reported by the CCP and ignoring the 100s of videos of days long queues to cremations that are running 24/7 and saying “oh the 1000 fold increase in deaths is not related to covid”.

Indian population growth is hardly indicative of winning. That china’s population is growing and will shrink below 1 billion before stabilizing is a net win for them in the long run if they can weather the fall out of dealing with an aging population. India, on the other hand, while having a lot of kids to do work, will have to find them productive jobs and such, it could act against quality of life getting better.

Your basic picture of what life is like in China is way off.

> They spent years telling their citizens that their way is the right way

The government doesn't have to work very hard to convince people in China of this. Living standards have increased dramatically in a relatively short period of time. People see how much their own lives have improved, and they don't need further convincing.

> yet India is growing steadily while Chinas population is crippling, ...

Living standards in China are far above those in India. This is like comparing the US to Mexico. That's how large the gulf is.

> I don’t understand the mental gymnastics people go through trying to justify and defend China when the people are suffering.

If you go to China, you'll have a hard time convincing people that they're suffering so much. By and large, people do not feel that way, simply because their standard of living has increased so rapidly.

> It’s like believing the covid deaths reported by the CCP and ignoring the 100s of videos of days long queues to cremations

Zero-CoVID was a real policy, and it really did keep the virus almost completely out of China for more than two years. Anyone who lived in China during that time can confirm this for you. It helps to have some actual on-the-ground experience or connections, rather than trying to interpret random videos of crematoria. Nobody I know in China got CoVID at all until December 2022, when the zero-CoVID policy was lifted. Then, they all got it in the space of one month.

LATAM border like <10k, insignificant % when talking about PRC emigration, especially capital flight real estate parkers you were referencing to. Ditto with low double digit PRC buying condos in ASEAN for wintering and having access to international schools because their mediocre kids can't hack it. And again, they’re not the cohorts that matter for articles like this.

>ignoring the high unemployment

High youth unemployment, and no, it's fundementally a symptom of why PRC is improving in scitech and industry. State over capacity is generating like 4-5M STEM a year, 20% means they're finding jobs for 4M STEM and like 6M (out of 8M) undergrads, that's a stupendous amount of skilled talent entering the workforce relative to anyone else. West and folks who wank over PRC unemployment should be shaking that PRC ONLY has 20% youth unemployement. Is there enough job supply to match talent oversupply? No, but there's still a fucking crazy amount of jobs to compete globally, relative to when PRC was producing 2M stem per year with 10% youth unemployment. The net increase in high end opportunities is doubling per year relative to 00-10s. Hence PRC moving up these innovation indexes and supply chain value. Not to mention youth unemployment is only high because high household savings lets a lot of urban youth lounge around for options, which aren't always good, eventually they'll give up and settle, which is why broader unemployment is like 5%. Or quoting unrelated stats like home foreclosures that doesn't shit like science output, you realize US S&E output increased during GFC and other economic downturns when people were losing their houses right.

COVID sort of turned that around a bit: it became more important to go abroad and not get stuck getting locked down in Shanghai or one of China’s top cities. We have to see where things land now that china has abandoned zero COVID.

No, this is just expected, China has many more researchers (and will have even more in the future) than the US. Also, US is imposing visa restrictions, while China is attracting talent from other countries. Finally, US is investing only a fraction of what it should do in applied research.

Follow the money, and the prestige.

There's no money or prestige for going into academia in the US - quite the opposite, in fact. Unsurprisingly, this is not a winning formula for getting research done.

Once we step out of the American bubble, it is very clear that American research is top notch, but other countries have basically caught up.

America just doesn't attract (or retain) the best. Opportunities are quite high in other countries for them to consider American immigration nonsense.

> it is very clear that American research is top notch, but other countries have basically caught up.

I agree. The last time we've seen a similar parity in R&D capacity was probably the 1950s-1960s.

That said, a lot of discourse around geopolitical rivalries is kind of stuck in a pre-1990s mindset. Even at its worst, countries with actual military disputes continue to be closely economically connected and (excluding Russia over the past year) we haven't seen the kind of economic decoupling that we saw in the 1970s-90s globally.

So long as nations globally maintain diplomatic contact and continue to be connected via diasporas and economic relations, there is always an off-ramp for political disputes.

P.S. Do NOT quote Russia as a counter example to my final example. Russia has been under severe EU+USA sanctions since 2014. The only difference is that these sanctions did not extend to Belarus until 2022, which was used as a backdoor to maintain EU-Russia economic relations.

I would say that the decoupling has been more from the side of US/Europe than the rest of the world. Asia, Africa and South America are becoming more strongly connected. That's why the Russian sanction didn't work (and won't work in the future).

> Opportunities are quite high in other countries for them to consider American immigration nonsense.

I find it utterly baffling that the US is in a position to easily absorb the best and brightest from other countries, and yet shoots itself in the foot with ridiculously restrictive immigration policies.

I agree as well.

Sadly, neither side wants to negotiate. On the Federal Dems side reform on skilled immigration needs to also be lumped with undocumented immigrant reform, and on the Federal GOP side due to some semblance of racism plus opposition to negotiating over undocumented immigration. I sadly speak from experience working on this.

Silver lining, just about every other country sucks as skilled immigration as well. But on the negative side, skilled professionals in Israel+India+PRC+SK+ASEAN increasingly prefer to stay put over being in immigration limbo.

[0] - https://www.politico.com/story/2013/12/nancy-pelosi-immigrat...

It is so strange. The decline in competitiveness is so obvious.

American cars can't compete with Asian or German cars. No engineers.

American homes aren't built for efficiency. No engineers.

American semiconductor and hardware tech is powered by immigrants. If/When they leave because of backlogged immigration, the companies will see more competition. Already America is resorting to sanctioning Chinese semi companies because American companies can't compete.

American software industry is powered by h1b slaves who can get deported by BS American laws themselves.

America is out of doctors and nurses too.

The only thing America succeeds at is financial engineering and management enriching itself.

Baffling!

American cars were never that good, always built to a price. Nothing to do with engineering competency.

American cars tend to be a lot cheaper to maintain than German.

Yes, the decline of the US industry is also correlated with the decline of engineering. There are fewer and fewer people interested in becoming engineers, and when it happens it is software engineering and financial engineering as you said (which is great, but not the engineering you need for industrial production).

But it does absorb the beat and the brightest?

Well, they used to do it for 70 years. So it not that America didn't fully use its opportunities. It's that other countries caught up to this, while the US thinks it doesn't need to worry about competition.

Shooting yourself in the foot with immigration policy is the default, not the exception.

Roughly speaking, developed countries want to welcome the immigrants who would contribute to the economy and reject the ones who would be a burden. But it's difficult to achieve that with a single set of policies and a single immigration authority. Usually you end up either encouraging or discouraging immigration categorically. Either the culture in the immigration authority leans towards accepting anyone who could plausibly meet the criteria, or it's constantly looking for excuses to reject any application. Most countries tend to choose the latter.

>America just doesn't attract (or retain) the best. Opportunities are quite high in other countries for them to consider American immigration nonsense.

In a survey of scientists from 16 countries <http://spectrum.ieee.org/at-work/tech-careers/the-global-bra...>, the US is the top destination from 13 of the 15 others and the #2 choice from the other two. If you are a Canadian scientist, there is a 16% chance <https://www.reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/comments/37lgxg/the...> that you will move to the US. That's not "16% of all Canadian scientists that move out of the country move to the US". Let me repeat: 16% of all Canadian scientists move to the US. They're also likely to be among the top Canadian scientists, too.

America still brain drains best, issue is really PRC talent production so great post academic reforms that limits of US immigration / global brain drain efforts is losing competitiveness to sheer numbers that stay in PRC.

Similar practice to CNRS and Max Planck Institute.

whatever you need to cope

I know people who don't want to pray for their kids safety in school.

Violence isn't gonna come down unless mental health problem and fun couture changed which is very unlikely to happen.

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