Top scientists lead growing exodus of Chinese academics from US

Chinese researchers are returning home in growing numbers, motivated to leave the US by a mix of push and pull factors, including a more hostile US foreign policy and larger research budgets in China.

Talented scientists making the journey back to China are part of a structural trend that has been accelerating since the 2010s. However, this rise comes as technological and scientific rivalries between the US and China grow increasingly tetchy and with China boosting its output in elite global science journals and climbing in university and research rankings.

Significantly, returnee academics are often among the strongest performers in research. So far in 2026, more than a dozen very high-profile Chinese scientists have left prestigious roles in the US to pursue top jobs in China.

Chen Ye, a semiconductor quality control expert, is the latest case in point. With nearly two decades in the industry, Ye has just been appointed a Qiushi distinguished professor in Zhejiang University’s College of Integrated Circuits.

The topic of Chinese returnees has been freshly interrogated in a research paper by the Stanford Center on China’s Economy and Institutions, which analysed the scientific output of 1.2 million scholars between 2003 and 2022. The study found that the number of scientists journeying home to China has shot up from 31 in 2004 to 1,409 in 2022.

A returnee is understood by the authors as “an ethnically Chinese scientist whose affiliation shifts from overseas to China”.

Many Chinese researchers choose to remain in the US. Research from the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, published at the end of last year, looked at 100 Chinese-origin top artificial intelligence researchers at US institutions in 2019 and found that 87 of them were still at US institutions in 2025.

Only 10 had left for Chinese companies or universities, and the remaining three had moved to other countries. Notably, however, those who did return were “very high impact”, the authors wrote.

Lizzi Lee, a fellow on the Chinese economy at the Asia Society Policy Institute’s Center for China Analysis, described the trend of Chinese scholars returning home as troubling for several reasons.

“What moves with the researcher is tacit knowledge, for example, identifying the most useful research questions. That is the mechanism I would worry about strategically,” she said.

A second-order problem that “may ultimately be larger than the departures”, Lee continued, was the shrinking of the talent pipeline.

“If fewer top Chinese students come to the US for PhDs, fewer stay for postdocs, and faculty become less funded – for example, they could not get federal funding – then the US loses not just top talents today, but a large part of the mechanism through which it has historically replenished its scientific pipeline.”

The departures of Chinese scholars from the US accelerated in 2018 during Donald Trump’s first term as president, spurred on by the administration’s claims of espionage and the launch of the “China Initiative”, which led to widespread investigations into US-based academics of Chinese descent.

The second Trump administration has also intensified funding uncertainty and scrutiny of China.

“Trump’s science policy in his second term has accelerated the exodus of Chinese scholars out of US,” Yisu Zhou, professor of public policy and sociology at Duke Kunshan University, told Times Higher Education. He described current trends as “almost unthinkable a decade ago”.

“Many of them [Chinese ethnic scientists] will choose to go back to China or…Hong Kong, Macao, Singapore, et cetera. It is a gift to the Chinese ambition to become the leading nation in science and technology, as well as its determination to use science and technology to catalyse economic growth…The government’s long-term commitment signals stability and funding, something the US really lacks at this moment,” he said.

“I see it as a real loss for the American scientific community because the credibility and confidence lost here is hard to measure.”

China’s larger research budgets and its strong “talent attraction policy in general” make the move appealing, and there is a good deal of “frontier-level work” in China, Lee added.

“AI, EVs, new energy, robotics, advanced manufacturing, biotech – talents genuinely see China as being at or near the technological frontier. And Chinese firms are increasingly global household names worldwide and peer competitors with Silicon Valley firms,” she said.

“Chinese tech companies are quickly advancing and offering increasingly more comparable compensations to those from US tech companies.

“Fifteen years ago, a very ambitious Chinese scientist would much prefer doing frontier-tier work in America. Today, the innovation hubs in China also offer opportunities for cutting-edge work.”

Although a pay gap exists between Silicon Valley and China’s big tech firms – compensation packages in Silicon Valley are frequently double or triple those in China – there are other professional factors to consider, not least “the bamboo ceiling” that many Chinese encounter in the US, said Lee. This refers to the systemic barriers faced by Asians and Asian Americans in the workplace, including racism and stereotypes.

It is not all sunny uplands in Chinese universities, though. “There are still many issues with the Chinese science and technology system,” said Zhou.

Chinese researchers returning home have to compromise, Lee added. “China still has a ton of unpleasant bureaucratic and political constraints on academia, and some returnees definitely lose international collaborators.”

rosalind.skillen@timeshighereducation.com