US fuels brain drain to China with Trump’s anti-science ‘Cultural Revolution’
Chinese-American researchers are finding similarities with chaotic period under Mao Zedong that targeted intellectuals in China
The upheaval continued for a decade, crippling China’s science and education sectors as well as its economy, leaving scars that lasted for generations. Chinese-American scientists have independently noted similarities with the United States under President Donald Trump.
A number of Chinese-American researchers interviewed by the Post shared the same impression, describing their careers as “chaotic” and the path forward as looking increasingly uncertain.
Among them was a biologist, based in the American Midwest, who asked not to be named because he feared retribution. Aged in his late 50s, he said that he had once planned to stay in the US until retirement.
“Now it’s utter madness,” he said, adding that one of his approved research proposals was recently rescinded after a federal review flagged terminology related to emerging vaccine technologies. “I’m looking for opportunities to go back to China next year.”
The White House moved to downsize the nation’s research establishment earlier this year, with its proposal to “eliminate waste” by slashing budgets at major science agencies and merging long-standing institutes under broader political control.
In recent weeks, there have been large-scale lay-offs spanning a range of disciplines, from about 4,000 scientists at Nasa to hundreds of employees at the US Centres for Disease Control and Prevention.
During China’s Cultural Revolution, intellectuals were branded as enemies of the people – the “stinking ninth class” – under the slogan “the more you know, the more subversive you are”.
Fang Shimin, a China-born researcher-turned-critic now living in the US, wrote on social media that the “new Trump-era Cultural Revolution”, like the Chinese experience, placed political loyalty above expertise.
He cited an October 2 report in the journal Science that said four directors from the National Institutes of Health were collectively fired, stripped of tenure and had their laboratories shut down.
“These academic positions will all have to be filled by laymen loyal to Trump, to faithfully execute the great leader’s instructions to destroy American scientific research,” Fang wrote.
Denis Simon, a visiting professor at Duke University’s Asian/Pacific Studies Institute, echoed Fang’s view, saying that he had seen expertise being discarded in favour of political loyalty.
“The message is: don’t trust intellectuals,” Simon said. “The demise of value for true expertise is where the US is shooting itself in the foot.”
However, the US had not seen the violence of China’s Cultural Revolution, he noted. Professors in China at the time were publicly humiliated, forced to wear dunce caps and paraded through the streets. Many ended up taking their own lives.
“China was extreme and radical during the Cultural Revolution,” Simon said. “While the US is broken, it’s not broken like that. The better comparison, I think, is that while the US is moving backwards, China is moving forwards.”
The Cultural Revolution left China’s scientific enterprise in ruins. An entire generation of scientists missed the chance to train and the isolation from the world’s scientific community set Chinese research back by decades.
Analysts said the US could face a similar loss of talent if current trends continued. According to Simon, the uncertainty has already disrupted projects and teams, driving foreign-born and some American scientists abroad, where funding is more stable.
In the long run, such disruption would be likely to inflict “irreparable damage” on the US research and development system, he said.