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The US has been discriminating against Chinese researchers for government funding and accusing them of spying on behalf of the Chinese government. It’s no surprise at all when top researchers go over to China as a result.
That’s probably a significant factor but from my time in academia I talked to a lot of Chinese people who said it was a major point of pride for China to be able to draw top researchers home from the West.
Something like 30 or 40 years ago China’s research reputation was really poor and their best candidates were all training in the West and then not coming back if they found any success. They’ve been improving that situation for decades and now they’re obviously a top-tier research country.
A lot of their best candidates now train in China but it’s still seen as very prestigious any time they can attract a successful Chinese researcher back from a career in the US. She may or may not have been facing some kind of BS here but most of the time these people are recruited hard and well incentivized. If they want you then they’re probably offering a pretty sweet deal.
Back when I was working at a large university in Denmark, our administration kept harping on and on about how we as an institution needed to be mindful of the Chinese attempts to steal our researchers. I was already pretty pro-China at that point, so I would just mock the messages to my colleagues by talking about the sneaky attempts to steal our researchers by offering them better pay, living standards, funding for their research and less political intervention in their work. Most of my colleagues didn’t understand why China was even considered a problem, but before the initiative even got off the ground, the war in Ukraine happened, and suddenly we all had to go to mandatory meetings about the evil russians and the heroic ukrainians (whom we were now arming to the teeth).
Full text
Prominent blockchain researcher Chen Jing has left the United States to join Tsinghua University in Beijing as a full-time professor.
The award-winning scholar and chief scientist said she would bring “a dual perspective from academia and industry” to help develop computational economics in China, according to an announcement by the university on Tuesday.
Chen, who returned to China last year after spending 15 years in the US, said she aimed to address gaps in domestic research and develop cutting-edge theories to improve China’s blockchain technology, Tsinghua said in its statement.
Chen earned her bachelor’s degree in computer science from Tsinghua in 2004 and her master’s from the same university in 2007. She completed her PhD at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 2012 under the mentorship of Silvio Micali, a Turing award laureate.
“I simply wanted to conduct the best research. At the time, the best research in computer science was in the US,” Chen said in a video posted on Tsinghua’s social media account.
“Now it is time to share the experience I’ve gained in academia and industry with my students in China, and leverage my international influence to support Tsinghua and its computer science department.”
Chen said she was committed to training younger researchers in computational economics, equipping them to identify and solve real-world societal problems.
She has been particularly focused on studying how multiple participants, such as humans and artificial intelligence, interact within modern computer systems like e-commerce and social networks.
According to her Tsinghua faculty profile, Chen has designed and analysed such systems to optimise their efficiency and security, and to withstand events such as hacking or cyberattacks.
Chen said she believed that improved computational efficiency in large economic systems could increase the predictive accuracy of economic cycles, leading to better evaluation of policy outcomes.
During her doctoral studies, Chen applied a groundbreaking approach in computational theory to major issues in the field of cognitive game theory, such as developing mechanisms to ensure truthful behaviour in auctions, even when participants may collude, according to Tsinghua.
After earning her PhD, Chen joined New York’s Stony Brook University as an assistant professor, where her team challenged the blockchain trilemma hypothesis, which refers to inherent limitations of the technology, suggesting that security, scalability and decentralisation cannot be simultaneously optimised.
Chen’s team developed and proved a new consensus protocol that gained industry attention.
She later served as chief scientist and head of theory research at Algorand Technologies, a blockchain platform created by her PhD adviser, focusing on efficient and secure cryptocurrency transactions using a proof-of-stake mechanism.
Chen’s contributions have earned her numerous accolades, including the US National Science Foundation’s Faculty Early Career Development Award in 2016. She also completed a postdoctoral fellowship at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton.
