Chinese authorities have put an entire “system” in place to poach top scientists working in the US and encourage them to go back to China, Strider Technologies CEO Greg Levesque has indicated.
“What the Chinese government has set up is a system. That is system is built to incentivize folks to make those decisions to go to the US, go to the UK, study, learn, and then there are financial and reputational benefits to actually go back [to China],” Levesque explained. “They have a name for the system, it’s the ‘Talent Superpower Strategy’. That system includes not only recruiting talent, but also sending emerging talent overseas.”
The security and intelligence analyst is the author of the bombshell report published last month detailing China’s strategy of recruiting top Chinese-born scientists working at Los Alamos and convincing them to return to the motherland, sometimes to work on advanced military technology including hypersonics, drones, jet engines, submarines and powerful warheads.
Levesque says he was shocked to find out how many scientists China succeeded in luring back home while writing his report, saying “it was not a couple, it was the vast majority.”
“What we have on our hands here is a nation state that is literally targeting national labs, and they’re sending people and recruiting people from those institutions. That’s a national security threat. If this is happening at Los Alamos, what’s happening at university research institutions, what’s happening at facilities of our allies?” he asked.
10 October 2022, 08:52 GMT
Levesque’s report calculated that a whopping 162 Chinese-born permanent staff, visiting scholars and postdoctoral researchers from Los Alamos were recruited by Chinese authorities and academia to return home between 1987 and 2021, with many of them settling at the Southern University of Science and Technology (SUSTech) in Shenzhen – one of the Asian nation’s top science schools.
Earlier this month, nearly a dozen congresspeople sent Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm a letter urging her to address the information in the Los Alamos report and accusing China of “infiltrating US research and technology laboratories, academic institutions and industries” and “stealing our research and technology.”
The Department of Energy has prohibited its personnel from engaging with Chinese talent recruitment schemes since 2019.
The brain drain from Western countries highlighted in the Strider report has been accompanied by a brawn drain, with UK media reporting Tuesday that the nation’s former military pilots have been recruited by China and paid six figure salaries to train their Chinese counterparts. Separately on Tuesday, an investigation by US media revealed that over 500 US military retirees have worked for foreign governments since 2015.
'America’s Secret Weapon'
Amid these recent complaints about Chinese activities in “poaching” scientists and military personnel, the United States itself has been accused of doing exactly the same thing to prop up its sagging technological superpower status over the decades.
In 2011, leading American theoretical physicist Dr. Michio Kaku said that America has the “worst educational system known to science,” but that compensates for it with a “secret weapon” – the H1B ‘Genius visa.’
“Without the H1B the scientific establishment of this country would collapse. Forget about Google, forget about Silicon Valley. There would be no Silicon Valley without the H1B,” Kaku said, pointing out that the majority of PhD candidates at US educational institutions were foreign born. “The United States is the magnate sucking up all the brains of the world but now the brains are going back. They’re going back to China, they’re going back to India, and people are saying ‘oh my God, there’s a Silicon Valley in India now. Oh my God there’s a Silicon Valley in China’…Duh!” the academic stressed.
The former Soviet bloc is also no stranger to the US and European brain-poaching, with the Russian Academy of Sciences estimating in 2015 that at least 80,000 of the country’s mathematicians, physicists, engineers and scientists left Russia in the first half of the 1990s alone. According to Russian New University rector Vladimir Zernov, the training of these ‘lost scientists’ alone cost the USSR and Russia the equivalent of over $1 trillion, not counting losses from the outflow of know-how.