With her newly minted Ph.D. in international relations from the University of Washington, a Chinese graduate student had high hopes of landing an interesting job in the United States. But after waves of applications and rejections, she is now broadening her search to Europe and her native China.
“The challenges have increased a lot,” says Danwei, whose surname is being withheld to protect her privacy. The twin hurdles of the Trump administration’s anti-immigration stance, and billions of dollars in cuts to federal funding of universities and research institutions, have made it “much harder to find a job and sponsorship and stay in the U.S.,” she says. “That is why I am looking for jobs in China.”
Danwei’s travails are not rare among the hundreds of thousands of students and scholars from China who make up a major pool of intellectual talent at U.S. schools and research facilities. Students from China earned nearly 60,000 doctoral degrees at U.S. universities between 2011 and 2021, far more than students from any other country. The vast majority were in science and engineering fields, according to the National Science Foundation.
Why We Wrote This
Chinese students and scholars have long made up the largest foreign scientific community in America, a major talent pool. The Trump administration has not made them feel welcome; can Beijing tempt them to return home?
Policies that threaten to drive such talent away from American shores could lead to a “brain drain” that would weaken the United States’ international dominance in higher education and technology, experts say. Some 277,000 Chinese nationals are currently studying in the U.S.
“This is about to what extent the U.S. is still a welcoming society, especially for these Chinese scientists” and scholars, says Yanbo Wang, associate professor of strategy and innovation at the University of Hong Kong.
In May, Secretary of State Marco Rubio vowed that the State Department would “aggressively revoke visas for Chinese students” and increase “scrutiny of all future visa applications” from China and Hong Kong.
Late last month, President Donald Trump appeared to reverse that stance, saying that Washington would issue 600,000 visas for Chinese students over the next two years. But that drew harsh criticism from Mr. Trump’s MAGA base, reinforcing the feeling among Chinese scholars that they are persona non grata.
The uncertainty impacts not only recent graduates, but top-notch Chinese scholars who have been working in the U.S. for decades, says Dr. Wang. “Suddenly, they realize, ‘I thought I was part of this melting pot society. Probably, I was wrong,’” he says. “This has triggered many of them to rethink their career prospects.”
Moreover, the Trump administration’s cuts to federal grants are forcing scientists “to reconsider whether the U.S. is a research-friendly environment,” he adds.
Alexander F. Yuan/AP/File
It’s different in China
China, on the other hand, is eager to attract talent from the U.S. and is now building upon the success of long-standing programs to recruit top overseas scholars to work full-time at Chinese universities.
One such program, the Young Thousand Talents program, established in 2015, offers leading early-career STEM scientists from foreign universities generous incomes, housing subsidies, and start-up grants.
Other incentives – including a lab – persuaded mid-career China-born scientist Hanqing Jiang to leave the U.S. after working at American universities for 20 years. He joined the faculty of Westlake University in China’s eastern city of Hangzhou.
“Someone showed me the lab space, and I was so amazed,” he says. “It was my dream. I could have my own lab.”
Dr. Jiang, chair professor of mechanical engineering at Westlake, says his time in the U.S. was formative, giving him vital academic independence. “I developed my own research style” during 15 years at Arizona State University, he says.
But Westlake, a public-private research university established in 2018, offered him new opportunities to apply his research through cooperation with industry. He dived into robotics, developing a humanoid robot in his lab and launching a start-up company. He hopes to train his robot in a real-world setting later this year.
“I personally needed more space – a higher ceiling for my career,” he says. Still, he acknowledges that “moving back across the ocean is not an easy thing,” especially for mid-career scientists.
Indeed, so far, U.S.-based scholars such as Dr. Jiang who return to China are in the minority.
“It’s too early to see … the real impact of the actions taken by the current [U.S.] administration,” says Hong Kong University’s Dr. Wang.
The lure of America
For years, the overarching pattern has been for Chinese who earn doctorates in STEM fields to remain in the United States after graduation. About 90% of those graduating between 2000 and 2015 were still living in the U.S. as of 2017. And, in 2023, 83% of those who earned their degrees between 2017 and 2019 remained in the U.S., according to National Science Foundation data.
For Angela, a student from China who graduated in June with a master’s degree in education from the University of Washington, visa uncertainty as well as education funding cuts complicated her job search.
The Trump administration had begun revoking Chinese student visas, she says, and it seemed as though she needed a green card to get a teaching job in the U.S. She applied for about 100 positions without success.
“It was super stressful. I told all my friends I was suffering from political depression,” says Angela, who withheld her last name to protect her privacy. Her parents urged her to return to China, an option she was weighing when a friend helped her land a teaching job at a California middle school.
“There’s no perfect country in this world,” says Angela. “But after evaluating my life, and working conditions in China and the United States, I still feel like the United States is better for me.”
