Is China becoming Europe’s top science partner amid an American brain drain?
‘Massive changes in the global flow of talent’ are creating opportunities, according to the head of Germany’s Max Planck Society
“These are exactly the questions that I think about all day,” Cramer said during an interview in Shenzhen in April.
“But there is another trigger – the rise of China. There is more money in China, so China is building more institutions and there are more academic jobs available.”
He said global conflicts including wars meant “people sometimes are in a country where they have difficulties doing their work because they cannot think clearly or recruit young people because it is an unsuitable situation”.
Many of those people who would normally go to the US are now going to different places in the world
But the outflow of talent is not just about star researchers leaving the US. Cramer noted a trend of top scientists returning to China to set up new institutes after successful careers abroad.
“The major effect is [on] the young talent – PhD students and postdocs – who would normally go to the US to do a PhD or a postdoc. Many of those are still going to the US but there are not so many positions and some also cannot get visas or have other difficulties,” he said.
“Many of those people who would normally go to the US are now going to different places in the world. Who is benefiting from those? I think China will benefit, Europe will benefit.”
He said countries with the funds to pay for additional salaries would benefit most, noting that Brazil was another nation that had boosted science funding.
The Max Planck Society has long drawn international talent and its cooperation with China – especially the Chinese Academy of Sciences – is already substantial.
Last year, the society and Chinese researchers collaborated on 157 projects, according to Cramer.
From 2019 to 2023, their joint publishing efforts resulted in nearly 8,700 papers, making China its fourth-largest partner country, behind the US, Britain and France.
Cramer said Chinese scientists made up about 15 per cent of its young researchers.
He said the goal was to foster an exchange of talent, rather than a one-way brain drain, to ensure that scientists could learn from the brightest minds and nurture the next generation worldwide.
Cramer, a chemist and structural and molecular biologist, recounted his career path, which included studies in Europe and training in the US. After returning to Germany, he trained researchers from 30 countries in his lab and they went on to become professors back home, including in China and the US.
The Max Planck Society maintains ties with former postdocs who returned home via 70 “partner groups” across China. These early career researchers receive five years of funding to help set up labs and continue collaborating with their German counterparts.
Cramer said there was a clear incentive for the society to deepen its China partnership: access to the country’s world-class scientific infrastructure.
Europe’s biggest radio telescope is the Effelsberg, 100 metres in diameter, and is operated by the Max Planck Society near Bonn.
“Some of the people at FAST have been trained at the Max Planck Institute for Radio Astronomy before they came to FAST,” Cramer said. “This is wonderful because they know each other extremely well. They continue to work together.”
The telescopes are complementary. He said FAST’s large antenna found new objects like pulsars while Effelsberg’s smaller, more flexible antenna was used to conduct “very long, careful and intensive follow-up study” on the details.
We have shown that you can achieve sustainable and peaceful development of a continent with many different languages and countries. That is possible
“The European continent throughout the century suffered a lot from wars. There were rapid developments in some parts and slow in the other, so there are a lot of differences within Europe,” he said.
“But over the last decades, we have shown that you can achieve sustainable and peaceful development of a continent with many different languages and countries. That is possible.”
Instead of focusing on the US or China, Europe must define its own strengths, approach and values, he said.
Cramer said the “European way” was rooted in upholding democracy, striving for sustainable development, fighting climate change and listening to “rationality and to the voices of reason”.
“We want to work with everyone who shares these values and our goals. We are open to all sides. This is what we call multilateralism,” he said.
“This is very important because we do have many leaders in the world who like to isolate themselves in many different parts of the world. Right now, it is very strong in the United States with the ‘America first’ strategy.
“As Europeans, I think we should simply work with people from different countries who share our vision … to act in a way that is good for the planet and humanity, and to cooperate, rather than working against each other.”
Cramer also said Europe had lessons to learn from China. “China is showing you how to organise people to cooperate to do big building projects, big bridges and big engineering projects.”
He gave the example of a robotics lab in Shenzhen – part of the new Max Planck Society-Chinese Academy of Sciences Centre for Synthetic Biochemistry.
Cramer described the four-floor facility that automates genetics research as “a very Chinese project because you need many people to cooperate on a common goal, which is very impressive”.
“I think it is very, very difficult to do in Europe. We do not have such a facility of that scale and of that [level of] sophistication. We can learn a lot from China, and I think China can also learn from Germany and Europe,” he said.
“We are in a globalised world. To fall back into a fragmented world would slow down the development of humanity. That is the way I would love that Europe would act.”
Cramer, who visited Beijing in 2013 when the air was choked with smog, said it could not have been predicted that China’s scientific and national development would happen so quickly.
“It was clear that at that time that something had already changed. In 2008, China started to get people back from all over the world, mainly the United States,” he said.
Beijing launched its Thousand Talents Plan that year to entice Chinese scientists, academics and entrepreneurs living overseas to return home.
“I saw young people going back and setting up labs, but I would not have believed that it was so rapid,” he said.
“In just a little over 10 years, China [was] able to come up with all this high-end technology. They would build trains themselves just as good as Japan or Germany and they would have electrical cars just as good as Tesla. At least to me, that was not predictable in 2013.”
But he said there were areas for concern, noting that the rapid growth might not be sustainable, and calling the handling of the pandemic a “zero-Covid disaster”.
“Looking from the outside, at least, I think mistakes have been made,” he said. “In 2022, it really hit China very, very hard.”
“People suffered around the world,” he said, noting a mental health crisis among young people in Germany due to prolonged school closures. “The first Trump administration also made major mistakes with Covid that they did not believe that it was going to be so dramatic and did not listen to the scientists.”
While economically “difficult for Germany”, Cramer said this was “very good for the world” because China made solar power affordable, accelerating the global shift away from fossil fuels.
On China’s future role, he said: “I really encourage China to stay on that path [for it to] demonstrate that they can combine economic growth and growth of the wealth of the population, and at the same time become carbon neutral well before 2060.
“I think China should have a challenge to itself – ‘let’s do it much earlier’ – because it will even give a boost to the sustainable and green economy.
Cramer also noted that navigating global fragmentation – at a time when technological and scientific supremacy is now a fault line in international relations and security policy – required a careful approach.
“We distinguish between the scientists and our colleagues, and the government of the country,” he said, giving the example of separating the anti-science actions of the Donald Trump administration from colleagues at American universities.
“Despite all the attacks of the new US administration against American science, we want to strengthen our partnership with the US, especially in difficult times,” he said.
To this end, the Max Planck Society plans to set up new collaboration centres with top universities on America’s east and west coasts.
He said the society – which includes researchers from 138 countries – would only take a stance “if the science is affected”, such as defending freedom of science or scientists who “suffer from a certain politics”.
“It is very important to prevent cultural wars because if you do not prevent those, you endanger the scientific discourse – people will begin to discuss without scientific arguments,” he said.
“They will be emotional because maybe they have family in a certain country, or maybe they are from [certain] cultural backgrounds.”
He said the philosophy of the Max Planck Society was more important than ever – for science to be “the voice of reason in a rapidly changing world”.