copying a comment from a hackernews post about the same topic:
The FBI has been ruthlessly persecuting Chinese people with absolutely absurd charges. For example, "In a grant application you didn't list that you had met for coffee with X other student from your alma mater when you visited China for Lunar New Year. This constitutes fraud and possibly espionage." A grant application is not an SSBI application! These are genuinely absurd standards to be applying to people. The fact that the FBI has been overwhelmingly losing these racially motivated cases is cold comfort - having extremely powerful secretive police harassing you and your family is extremely distressing even if their case against you is ultimately unsuccessful, and the fact that they know they're losing and keep doing it suggests their intent is to try and discourage you from talking to any of your friends or family back in China, or leave the country. Careful what you wish for.
Declared academic collaboration between academic institutions in the US and China is being cracked down on as well. People and their families are being investigated with no evidence given as to why, the federal government is contacting US universities and convincing them to end collaborative programs, etc. The reasons given, if any, are that the Chinese are stealing American technology through these academic collaborations. Thinking for two seconds about what, exactly, an academic collaboration is intended to accomplish should show how absurd the "stealing" idea is.
A lot of the most valuable work in academia is collaborative, and a lot of the specific career value in being a Chinese national or having Chinese family ties in US academia is that you can function as an expert go-between for the two largest and most important countries for scientific research. When the US is not just devaluing but actively stigmatising some of your skills, it can force people to choose. The US is richer per capita, has more freedoms in many respects, etc, but the persecution by police is going to impact your assessment of where you'd rather live, especially when the PRC has open arms, lots of grant money, and scientists have a good position in society there too.
Hate crimes against Chinese people have been increasing dramatically for years. Chinese communities know this and also see very clearly that it's not a priority for either political party to do anything about it. Not much to say about this, it's obvious why you wouldn't want to live somewhere where there are enough people in the population committing hate crimes against you that most people are in community with a victim, and then there's no political will to do anything about it.
There's genuine concern about the possibility of war. If you know anyone in the American military, you know that war with China is on everyone's mind. Different dates get floated, from 2030 to 2027 to 2025, but it's essentially received wisdom in the US military that there is going to be a war in the westpac theatre at some point. This view ("We should be prepared") is also essentially bipartisan in the political realm, and American media are doing their part too. Chinese people notice, they can see the current (illegal, racist) persecution by the government, and most of them have enough historical knowledge to understand that the dynamics that lead to the Japanese internment camps haven't fundamentally changed - the camps themselves weren't even ruled to be illegal until 2018, only 5 years ago! If you were Chinese, would you want to stay in America and take the risk that you might end up confined to a camp, or wearing an ankle bracelet with a microphone everywhere just so the government can say that they didn't put a particular ethnic minority in literal camps? Genuinely, would you take that risk, with what you know about America? If the American government goes to war with China, and they decided on this sort of large scale persecution of Chinese people, do you think that any significant quantity of Americans with any political power would stand up for the Chinese people in America, or would it be like 9/11 where the government persecuted Muslims en masse and there was zero political will to stop them for years?
Love how everyone in the west believes that Chinese people literally cannot comprehend science without Stealing it from them. These are also the same people who discriminate against Asians for "being smarter than anyone else"
"The Russians never invent anything. All they have, they’ve got from others. Everything comes to them from abroad—the engineers, the machine-tools. Give them the most highly perfected bombing-sights. They’re capable of copying them, but not of inventing them. With them, working-technique is simplified to the uttermost. Their rudimentary labour-force compels them to split up the work into a series of gestures that are easy to perform and, of course, require no effort of thought." - Adolf Hitler
Good post and they also forgot another very important point.
Chinese universities and the government are giving extremely good financial incentives for new research and for these researchers one of the primary obstacles in western academia is funding, this is much less of a problem in China. In fact money alone would be a reason for any academic to move to China and I'd encourage everyone to do so for their own career prospects imo regardless of ideology.
Reminds me of the all-hands meetings I had to attend when i worked at a university last year. Legit had to listen to some sanctimonous administrator talk about ensuring that Other Countriestm did not "steal" our researchers. When i later spoke with a coworker about it, I joked that "how dare China pay more and offer better working conditions" and the guy just shrugged and said that he didn't really think it was a problem per se, but that the University was afraid of how it looked when everyone was looking elsewhere. I then countered by asking if we could maybe somehow hope to match these offers, and he just shrugged again and said that we had no hope for that kind of thing. Shortly after I had to attend a meeting about a new faculty facility that had gone over budget by roughly 250 million dollars, so wouldn't you know it, we're broke now.
I almost want to post this again since while the sinophobia shit is definitely an extremely important factor, it is also not really the only one. Clearly China is the place to be for easy funding and getting shit done.
Also, our economy is going to crash so hard when we go to war, where the fuck are we going to get all our goods? They all talk about derisking from China, but I really haven't seen any convincing paths forward for that to actually happen
I find them generally tremendously unempathetic people who still feel extremely confident in making grand proclamations about how poor people or people in other countries think and feel.
I mainly remember it for banning a mention of Graeber's Debt for the crime of overstating the importance of hacker spaces in the early computing industry in Seattle and San Francisco haha (probably actually for critiquing money tho)
copying a comment from a hackernews post about the same topic:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37018285
Love how everyone in the west believes that Chinese people literally cannot comprehend science without Stealing it from them. These are also the same people who discriminate against Asians for "being smarter than anyone else"
"The Russians never invent anything. All they have, they’ve got from others. Everything comes to them from abroad—the engineers, the machine-tools. Give them the most highly perfected bombing-sights. They’re capable of copying them, but not of inventing them. With them, working-technique is simplified to the uttermost. Their rudimentary labour-force compels them to split up the work into a series of gestures that are easy to perform and, of course, require no effort of thought." - Adolf Hitler
The most popular rifle in the entire world was designed by whom
Don't even bother trying that, they'll just say they copied it from the StG-44. It doesn't matter that the internals are completely different.
wow an automatic rifle with wooden furnishing huh? Real original slavvy
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Modern western society would collapse if they stopped stealing from others / exploiting the rest of the world
Good post and they also forgot another very important point.
Chinese universities and the government are giving extremely good financial incentives for new research and for these researchers one of the primary obstacles in western academia is funding, this is much less of a problem in China. In fact money alone would be a reason for any academic to move to China and I'd encourage everyone to do so for their own career prospects imo regardless of ideology.
Reminds me of the all-hands meetings I had to attend when i worked at a university last year. Legit had to listen to some sanctimonous administrator talk about ensuring that Other Countriestm did not "steal" our researchers. When i later spoke with a coworker about it, I joked that "how dare China pay more and offer better working conditions" and the guy just shrugged and said that he didn't really think it was a problem per se, but that the University was afraid of how it looked when everyone was looking elsewhere. I then countered by asking if we could maybe somehow hope to match these offers, and he just shrugged again and said that we had no hope for that kind of thing. Shortly after I had to attend a meeting about a new faculty facility that had gone over budget by roughly 250 million dollars, so wouldn't you know it, we're broke now.
Oh boy reminds me
China lures increasing numbers of research scholars from Japan - Ample funding and openings attract talent frustrated by chances at home
I almost want to post this again since while the sinophobia shit is definitely an extremely important factor, it is also not really the only one. Clearly China is the place to be for easy funding and getting shit done.
Also, our economy is going to crash so hard when we go to war, where the fuck are we going to get all our goods? They all talk about derisking from China, but I really haven't seen any convincing paths forward for that to actually happen
I thought hackernews was a bunch of libertarians
I mean that person probably is still a libertarian, just smarter than your average one
I find them generally tremendously unempathetic people who still feel extremely confident in making grand proclamations about how poor people or people in other countries think and feel.
hackernews isn't a monolithic group, there exists all sorts of people on there
I mainly remember it for banning a mention of Graeber's Debt for the crime of overstating the importance of hacker spaces in the early computing industry in Seattle and San Francisco haha (probably actually for critiquing money tho)
lmao love to ban books in my libertarian utopia
Great post, thanks for sharing it here