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Comment by esperent | Hacker News Reader

If someone studies in the US, spends years working there, and then decides that "actually, I'd have better opportunities in China" and moves back, then that's a failure of the US rather than China being a parasite.

That's not too say that China doesn't do industrial espionage. But brain drain, people voluntarily leaving because they don't like where the US is heading, ain't that.

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> If someone studies in the US, spends years working there, and then decides that "actually, I'd have better opportunities in China" and moves back,

What actually happens is that recruited scientists illegally use grants from the host country to fund research that is then sent back to China, and when they're caught, they also flee back to China.

https://www.thelantern.com/2020/11/former-ohio-state-researc...

https://www.science.org/content/article/moffitt-cancer-cente...

Using IP theft to improve a nation's economic and scientific standing is pretty common. The US did it too [0][1]. This is not whataboutery, but a simple fact that industrial espionage was the ladder that today's developed nations used, only to then kick away the ladder when the rest of the world tried to catch up.

0: https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/how-industrial-esp... 1: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2014/06/09/spy-vs-spy-3

From your links, there's precisely 1 people who has done industrial espionage, and 6 more people whom it seems broke their contracts "motivated by simple greed and a disregard for both institutional and federal rules". Which, the latter, doesn't imply any involvement from China at all.

> It describes how McLeod and Wei appear to have been running what NIH has called "shadow labs," using existing federal grants from U.S. agencies to help carry out research in China.

> Wei, the only ethnic Chinese person among the six fired researchers, was instrumental in establishing and maintaining his colleagues' connections with TMUCIH, according to the report.

> Dr. Wei maintained contact regarding Talents program applications with TMUCIH personnel, as well as other apparent Chinese contacts. Determining specifically with whom Dr. Wei communicated over this time period is difficult because communications were often to various web-based email addresses not directly traceable to individuals or entities and were in Mandarin Chinese.

So the Chinese person had better contacts in China?

Also, apparently it's impossible to know what they communicated because they used some weird technology called web based emails written in some impossible to decrypt code known as Mandarin Chinese.

Look, if you're determined to see China as the enemy, and can't see that at least some share of the failings falls on the US too, that's up to you.

Looking at this from outside both of those countries, I can say that if I was a wealthy, well educated, and well connected Chinese person living in the US any time in the last ten years or so, I'd be thinking strongly about going home too, and drawing on whatever contacts I had to make that happen.

You shared an example of a couple of people who did so illegally, but a far larger number of people are doing so using plain old fashioned and totally legal business networking.

If a recruiter calls from back home and says "hey, we're starting up an exciting new company in Shanghai and we want your expertise", there has to be good reasons to make a person say no. At the moment, the US is burning up all of those good reasons for almost all foreign workers.

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