China Is Suffering a Brain Drain. The U.S. Isn’t Exploiting It.
They went to the best universities in China and in the West. They lived middle-class lives in Beijing, Shanghai and Shenzhen and worked for technology companies at the center of China’s tech rivalry with the United States.
Now they are living and working in North America, Europe, Japan, Australia — and just about any developed country.
Chinese — from young people to entrepreneurs — are voting with their feet to escape political oppression, bleak economic prospects and often grueling work cultures. Increasingly, the exodus includes tech professionals and other well-educated middle-class Chinese.
“I left China because I didn’t like the social and political environment,” said Chen Liangshi, 36, who worked on artificial intelligence projects at Baidu and Alibaba, two of China’s biggest tech companies, before leaving the country in early 2020. He made the decision after China abolished the term limit for the presidency in 2018, a move that allowed its top leader, Xi Jinping, to stay in power indefinitely.
“I will not return to China until it becomes democratic,” he said, “and the people can live without fear.” He now works for Meta in London.
You can't exploit it. I know some people won't like to hear this, but Chinese expats are a security risk if they have any family still in China. It's well known at this point that the Chinese gov threatens family members to pressure and blackmail residents abroad to perform espionage.
You absolutely can still exploit it. Assign them to public and open research projects.
Good point, anything where Chinese govt can't get an advantage by stealing proprietary info.
Proper integration is needed, and I mean really really good integration, gov. funded!
Not here for this xenophobia. The people leaving are the people who don't particularly like the government.
It's a little ridiculous we have to keep saying that it's not OK to say "all X people can not be trusted." Even if the X is Chinese people, I know China is today's boogeyman. When X was Japanese people we got internment camps.
You're not really refuting the point though. It's not that 'Chinese people are untrustworthy'. It's 'Immigrants from China are vulnerable to blackmail and extortion by the CCP'.
The point as written in their comment is that we can't use smart Chinese immigrants at all. Quote "Chinese expats are a security risk." No nuance.
Anyone can be vulnerable to blackmail. People with gambling debts, people with credit card debt, business entanglements, money problems of any kind, cheaters, people who request to stay in a Russian suite once visited by Obama just to have prostitutes pee on the bed. Could be anyone.
In positions where blackmail is a concern, we have vetting procedures. So we can do better than just blanket saying Chinese people can't be trusted.
They don't have to particularly like the government in order to engage in espionage. Like the commenter above said, they just have to have family still in China. Just within the last few months, there were two separate cases of USN sailors, both from China but naturalized citizens, who turned over classified information to the Chinese government following family pressure from the Mainland.
We should never engage in the sort of blind discrimination that resulted in internment camps. The associated risk of having family/ties in China just needs to be properly evaluated when placing people with family in/ties to China in positions of trust. The vast majority of Chinese people will never engage in espionage. And they should also never be unduly punished for the actions of the very few among them who do.
Careful if you don't think Chinese people are mindless CCP drones with no independent thought you'll be down voted. Really disappointed with Lemmy's community so far it's just as bad as reddit.
Am honestly surprised our volatile political landscape didn’t figure into the equation more.
America's politics are probably the last thing on their mind.
only surprising to someone who's never known what real oppression feels like
..don't downplay USA's oppression just because it's not as bad in some ways. The US is quite bad on many fronts, even when compared with China. For example, abortion in China is legal, and the US incarcerates proportionally more people to what china does (although admittidly those are just public numbers).
Sure, I still would prefer to live in the US to China.. but it still ranks quite far down compared to many many other nations.
Possibly. Since every person with a uterus knows what oppression feels like the good ol USA, when their medical privacy and autonomy where stripped from them.
This article was written by your he Chinese secret services in order to easy the integration of their spies
Sounds like a win-win to me?
The U.S. doesn't want smart people anymore. The U.S. wants obedient consumers.
I think this article focuses more on personal reasons. For example: